Expositions 2024

A Dawdling line

Before becoming a cartoonist, Nylso's name was Jean-Michel Masson. Born in 1964, he worked in a Paris laboratory measuring air pollution. At the age of 27, he decided to leave everything behind to devote his life to drawing. Completely self-taught, he chose Nylso as his pen name, a double tribute to Nils Holgersson, the young hero of the novel of the same name by the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf, and to Mikhail Vassilievich Ostrogradski, an eminent Russian mathematician known as one of the discoverers of the flux-divergence theorem.

With his then partner, the late Jo Manix, he published the fanzine Le Simo in Rennes, and became close to the large community of young local authors who met at the specialist bookshop Alphagraph. In 2000, he enthusiastically took part in the fanzine published by the bookshop, delivering weekly episodes from the life of Jérôme d'Alphagraph, a young bookseller's apprentice. With these pages conceived without any premeditation, Nylso had just found his graphic style and his narrative universe. He has continued to expand it ever since, in a body of work totalling some twenty books.

Using a multitude of strokes drawn with a 0.1 Rotring pen, Nylso crafts musing narratives that alternate between small panels and full-page compositions. Some of the sequences are silent, while others feature characters conversing with finesse about books, identity, rain, the passage of time or travel, occasionally quoting Witold Gombrowisz, Paul Nizon or Robert Walser.

A self-confessed practitioner of drawing in a state akin to self-hypnosis, Nylso considers most of his illustrations to be ‘mental images’. He says he ‘likes to convey a feeling through drawing, that calm that people feel’.

Beyond this claimed calm, Nylso's works are permeated by strong emotions: joy, tenderness, melancholy. These emotions are all the more powerful for the reader because they are portrayed with a restraint that is always tinged with humour.

Translation : Éric Moreau