It’s not just the elections this weekend. Before or after fulfilling your duty as a citizen, it is strongly recommended to go to La Ferme du Buisson, in Noisiel (Seine-et-Marne), 20 minutes east of Paris. In this superb ensemble of 19th century working-class architecture, all in ornate bricks and wooden frames, a festival has been organized since 2014, combining comic strips with painting, theatre, music and cinema.
→ CRITICAL. When comics tell the destinies of women
After two editions canceled due to the Covid, this joyful event returns with a program as rich as it is eclectic. Among the three exhibitions dedicated to female figures of the 7th and 9th art, the one devoted to Alice Guy is the most playful. She looks back on the incredible and unjustly unknown journey of one of the pioneers of cinema, told in the latest work by illustrator Catel Muller and screenwriter Jean-Louis Bocquet (Casterman), and in a documentary recently broadcast on Arte (screened Saturday, April 9 at the Cinéma de la Ferme).
To compensate for the small number of originals, the inventive scenography relies on interactivity with the public, inviting them to have fun with optical toys or to discover astonishing extracts from a making of directed by Alice Guy, the first of the kind.
Mattotti masters color like dark shades
The richest exhibition is the one that reveals the “Obsessions” of the illustrator and author Lorenzo Mattotti. “The superintendent, Lucas Hureau, searched through all my drawers! »confirmed the Italian artist, whose colorful and undulating works appear in one of prestigious publications, the American magazine The New Yorker on your mind.
The course explores the twelve themes dear to the designer, addressed in his notebooks (1) or in his works of the last twenty years: sensual landscapes, bodies in fusion, hybrid creatures.
The visitor is greeted by a striking series of canvases of forests painted in India ink, hung on either side of a vast flared corridor. “Originally, these were sets to illustrate Hansel and Gretel, which the New Yorker had commissioned from me for an exhibition. I took them back later, in 2008 » says the artist, who also knows how to handle dark hues in these canvases evoking Soulages.
Forêt, de Lorenzo Mattotti / Lorenzo Mattotti
The dancers come alive under the crayons
In the other rooms, the colors burst in the face, propelled by the dynamic given to the drawing. Inspired by Italian futurist painters, Lorenzo Mattotti seeks to give a lot of movement to the image. “To achieve this, you have to achieve total purity, the essence of the gesture”he explains in front of his magical drawings of the carnival of Rio, where one believes to see the dancers come alive under the grease pencils and pastels.
Lorenzo Mattotti has also made a magnificent animated film, The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily (2019), adapted from a youth novel by Dino Buzzati. And he participated in the artistic direction of the Pinocchio by Enzo d’Alo (2013), two feature films screened this weekend at the Ferme du Buisson.