2023-12-29 22:36:40
The depression accompanied all his life Virginia Woolf, since she was just a child and blamed herself for her mother’s death, but she found in literature a way to live with the disease. Her books were fictions that subtly glided through those episodes that alternated anxiety with the void that was impossible to fill, with the fear of being trapped in endless anguish. Who knows if Septimusthe suicidal character of ‘Mrs Dalloway’, was an aspiration for a personal alter ego fatally fulfilled, but what is undoubtedly Woolf’s work clearly pointed to an oppressive society who did not hesitate to dig glassy abysses of sadness into which to sink. Unfortunately, a century later, his words seem to have fallen on deaf ears: we have built an insensitive society, which sows obstacles to the entire existence of the most disadvantaged. Those aspirations that built the supposedly happy future, work, home and family, are today unattainable utopias, magnified by the continuous media bombardment, implicit and explicit, which reminds us that, without money, we are nobody. It is not difficult to put two and two together: it is the ideal breeding ground for the depression trapped in those quicksands of sadness, which embrace tightly, leaving us exhausted. It is said, perhaps rightly, that depression is the pandemic of the 21st century, although more with the ambition of a clickbait headline than with the intention of acknowledging our share of the blame.
But, despite everything, Woolf’s path remains valid: creation is a way to confront that monster and fight itnot only as a personal catharsis, but as an agitator of other people’s consciences, as a collective awakener of that imposted dream that suggests that we resign ourselves to that reality.
Two comics hitting bookstore shelves this week They agree on many things: giving voice to depression from intimate experience and private therapy; in taking advantage of graphics through experimentation and, no less important, in having been rewarded for that daring. In ‘Magical Pessimism’ (Salamandra Graphic), the screenwriter and monologist Borja Sumozas recovers his role as an illustrator to narrate how the disease slowly devours accompanying Laura, a television scriptwriter with severe depression. We will experience up close how the world moves further away, how the infinite cell of loneliness grows fed by Fluoxetine, Orfidal, Omeprazole and Aldactone while An aggressive, almost Fauvist chromaticity nourishes a visceral and organic drawing. Reality is transformed into suffocating and oppressive atmospheres that easily slide into a terrifying dreamlike state, where the monstrosity takes palpable and distressing form while Laura sinks without us being able to help her, forcing us to reflect on that situation of which we are also a part. The FNAC/Salamandra Graphic award for graphic novels deservedly recognized a formal risk that impacts the reader.
‘The Olympics of suffering‘, of Enric Pujadas y Gonzalo Aeneas (Dolmen Editorial) received the Ciutat de Palma comic award with a proposal as daring as it was personal: the scriptwriter surgically dissects the reality of the cartoonist, who must face an impossible challenge for a depression patient, drawing his illness. Aeneas’s life is shown to us transparently: his work and personal problems, his fears and his failures, composing that scenario in which the cartoonist is trapped without being able to find windows through which he can breathe. But transferring to the reader that nightmare that only he could see is complex and the creative choice could not be more daring: a motley dance of styles, in which the manga line passes without a break in continuity to aesthetic minimalismbut what get perfectly express that feeling of loss and disorientation in the face of realityplaying with graphic symbolism to capture overflowing feelings.
Two very different works, but They take up Virginia Woolf’s baton to confront the disease with the most powerful therapy: creation.
#Drawing #void #Spain