Expositions 2024

Vibrating colours

"Drawing is the expression of life, of what we go through, of our thoughts, our feelings and inner revolutions. Only the result matters. What ends up on the paper, even the most jarring mixture of colours, is the expression of something to be used".

 Drawing as a rule of life. Like all great artists, Manuele Fior is fueled by an artistic craving, a passion which translates into an obsessive activity, all at once need, practice and pleasure. His versatile work, divided into thousands of different illustrations and eight graphic novels, demonstrates not only formal beauty but also expressive power with a visionary force of change. Each of his sketches reveals a quest for the motif that dictates desire. Fior's drawing may be the result of a missed opportunity, but it is never gratuitous; it bears witness to the acuity of an eye that aims to imprint its own sense of reality on reality itself.

This sensitive and intuitive relationship to images undoubtedly explains the magnetism of his art, the taut sensuality that strikes a chord of immediate feeling. Yet there is no single formula: the artist superimposes styles ad infinitum, from the most figurative to the most abstract, battling relentlessly with line and colour, matter and the unconscious, intention and dream.

 Born to a fighter pilot and a schoolteacher, he was drawn to comic books from an early age. When his parents refused to let him study art, he enrolled at the University of Architecture in Venice. At the turn of the millennium, while working as an architect in Berlin, he headed off to Egypt to draw with archaeologists. But when the author Igort founded Coconino Press, a publishing house that soon brought together the artists he most admired, such as Mattotti and Charles Burns, he submitted his first comic book pages. His first album, Les Gens le Dimanche, was published in 2004 by Atrabile. He moved from Berlin to Oslo, then to Paris, where he lived for thirteen years, before settling back in Venice. 

Through his travels, Manuele Fior has built up a treasure trove of images and experiences. Cinq mille kilomètres par seconde [5,000 Kilometers Per Second, Fantagraphics, 2016], his fourth album, which won the Fauve d'or at the Angoulême Festival in 2011, marked a turning point in his career. In this sentimental piece, he sublimates distance by playing against the clock with the trajectories of a love triangle. The book dazzles with the frank spontaneity of the watercolours and the use of ellipses. Not content with this success, Fior followed up with charcoal and Indian ink in the hypnotic L’Entrevue (Futuropolis, 2013). With Les Variations d'Orsay (Futuropolis, 2015), in which he had the opportunity to copy the masters of modern painting, he demonstrates his virtuosity with gouache, a technique he later continued using to explore the full potential of colour.

With Celestia (Atrabile, 2020) [Celestia, Fantagraphics, 2020], a Venetian odyssey dominated by blue and improvised around a disaster scenario, he pursues the dream of humanist hope. 

In his latest book, Hypericon (Dargaud, 2022) [Hypericum, Fantagraphics, 2022], he juggles his memories of Berlin and his experience of the desert, comparing shades of ochre and yellow to unravel the mysteries of grey and the light of time.

Combining imagination, ancient times and intimate drama, Manuele Fior's work escapes the compartmentalisation of genres. His style reflects an alchemy of influences that he combines quite naturally: Muñoz and Moebius, Miyazaki and Picasso, Disney and Schiele, Prudhomme and Stravinsky, Spielberg and Mattotti, Blutch and Gainsbourg, and Matsumoto and Rothko.

 From one work to another, constantly exploring, Manuele Fior tirelessly continues to delve into the narrative and graphic possibilities offered by the total art form that are comic books, in search of a new language.

Translation : Éric Moreau