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Free Fall

by Alexis Beauclair

240 x 300 mm -- 128 pages -- offset printed -- paperback -- ISBN 978-1-9110811-3-5

Free Fall collects nine stories by Alexis Beauclair, originally published in various anthologies over the last decade. Beauclair’s comics are wordless thrill-rides where form and landscape shift perception from image to image. The reader is propelled from one beautiful image to the next at breakneck speed, a rollercoaster ride across the landscape of one of the most singular and important comics artists working today, at the forefront of the French Abstract Formalist Comic Movement.

Free Fall was printed by offset lithography at Printon Trükikoda AS in Estonia.

Available to pre-order now from the Breakdown Press online store.

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Vanishing Perspective: Alexis Beauclair Interview

Alexis Beauclair is one of the best artists in contemporary European art comics. Beauclair’s immaculate minimalist works are the epitome of French Structural Comics. I edited his first collection Vanishing Perspective (2dcloud, 2018) and interviewed him for the publication.

How would you describe, define, or categorize the comics you make? Abstract comics?

I would like to say minimalism. Most of the time I try to refine as much as possible, to deal with the simplest parameters, with the pure mechanics of the comics form and to conduct experiments.

But I keep a certain classic comics codes: there are panels, and the reading is linear (even if I like to play with the entire page). I feel what I’m doing is more like an archeological search for the very roots of this sequential language.

I like when things are between the abstract and the figurative and when figures come to surface to play with this in-between.Humans are designed (and/or acculturated?) to see signs, to try to decrypt reality so with just a little bit of information they can link things and understand some logic. I’m fascinated by this process and love to question it.

Globe, 2008

What inspired you to develop a “minimalist“ style? Did you know previous so-called “abstract comics“ when you started yours?

No, I didn’t know the few experiments that had been done at the time, when I started my first minimalist project (Globe, 2008). I was thinking, “It’s unbelievable that nobody has ever done it yet! Why did the comics form wait so long to liberate itself from literature or illustration“ I dived into it intuitively. My first and biggest inspirations are maybe (adventures) comics in general that I had read, like Spirou or Tintin. For me, it’s about movement. Each comic book is a rush forward; the reader is led by the character walking, running, jumping, falling (ok they are also talking) within landscapes. And this movement doesn’t exist on its own like in the cinema. The movement is created by reading. And reading is a movement.

So I try to find what kind of energy drives comics beneath all the artifices (characters, stories, and anecdotes). Distill the comic to the maximum to reach its essence: movement.

What I love is composing images with shapes and lines so that the reader can decrypt these signs and imagine or feel the movement. Nothing exists without the reader; s/he is active; s/he projects her or his own experience into the life of movement; s/he applies physical laws to fixed images printed on paper.

I’m enchanted by this mental exercise. To associate images, to combine signs, to question them and drive drawings toward abstraction as if they were an imaginary language.

Labyrinth, 2014

The comics in this collection were originally published independently. What made you collect them together?

This collection focuses on my self-published line drawing-based minimalist comics. These comics are part of one body of research. The collection is in chronological order. It progresses from minimal figuration to non-figurative imagery, almost abstraction!

Photon, 2014

Photon is a simple progress through a corridor-like object; Labyrinth is just a minimal corridor of lines but with disorienting turns; Vanishing Perspective starts with minimal perspective, vanishes to just moving lines, and evokes minimal stories; and Sol is about the movement of multiples lines, a hypnotic end.

Vanishing Perspective, 2015

Sol is the most recent work from the collection. You mentioned that it’s an homage to Sol LeWitt. Why Sol LeWitt?

I was a Sol LeWitt fan, but I hadn’t seen his wall drawings in exhibition — only in books — before I saw them at MASS MoCA two years ago. The show blew my mind.

As I like to experiment with simple drawings elements I wanted to experiment with multiple lines. So when I got back to France, I decided to do a tribute to him, using his famous patterns.

I did a simple thing to adapt it to comic form. I changed the order of LeWitt’s patterns (vertical, horizontal, diagonal rising, diagonal descending). My goal was to create movement as lines rotated (vertical, diagonal rising, horizontal, diagonal descending = clockwise). That is the cover page.

Next, I played with the possibilities offered by these patterns and also with geometry. For example, when vertical lines turn on a diagonal axis, the lines become closer to each other.

So this is ideas of one or a few pages. The reader is invited to decrypt the rules involved, or just feel movement, or optical sensations.

Sol, 2016

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