Collection Lambert, Avignon, France
October 2021
Imagined as part of the program of BD 2020—deemed the “Year of the Comic Strip” in France – the exhibition Comics Trip! is envisaged as an incisive journey into the heart of radical drawing practices within contemporary art. It investigates the links that artists have forged with comic strip aesthetics and narrative drawing over the past sixty years and sheds light on the work of certain alternative comic strip artists working in the underground or whose practice deliberately departs from the expectations of a restrictive mass culture industry. Bringing together the drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos, music, and documents of over thirty artists from the 1960s to today, Comics Trip! presents several generations of artists engaged in deconstructing our relationship with the canons of good taste and beauty, in breaking down borders between high art and popular culture, and whose work is imbued by the subcultures with whom they share time and space and that they feed into. Raymond Pettibon displaces the pop aesthetic to the heart of hallucinatory drawings that initially feed into the underground music scene as sleeve art—for Black Flag and later Sonic Youth—before gaining autonomy and deploying an entirely new narrative schema, outlining with unprecedented boldness the entire mythology of an America beset by paranoia, that seems to live only through the adherence to messianic beliefs, whether from the major texts of monotheistic religion, New Age philosophies, conspiracy theories, or simply modern capitalism and the founding myths of the American way of life.