Charles Berberian signs "A fantastic era", a deceptively light and current comic strip
The French designer Charles Berberian, September 28, 2018, in Manosque (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence).
AFP - JOEL SAGET
Text by: RFI Follow
3 min
For several years, the designer Charles Berberian has been telling his time for magazines such as Grazia, l'Obs or Spirou.
During the spring 2020 confinement, the Editions du Chêne asked him to make a selection of his drawings to illustrate a large-format album, entitled “A fantastic era”: the result is an album that resonates with the period we are going through.
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To open Charles Berberian's album
A Fantastic Era
is to contemplate all that we lack in these times of pandemic: the designer likes to draw his city, Paris, its café terraces, cinemas, parties and music with friends.
This large format work shows a self-centered, hedonistic and carefree urban community, also inviting us to reflect on our paradoxes of ultra-connected urbanites… and heavy consumers of hamburgers.
“
In a week, we went from one era to another.
And I'm happy to have brought together in an album this sort of inventory of everything that was going, everything that was wrong, everything that made us happy or that caused our anguish,
”explains Charles Berberian.
Charles Berberian
draws with irony and tenderness the western city before the coronavirus - in black and white or in bright watercolors.
Music
is
the artist's other passion
, and it's a Bob Dylan with the head of a bird, guitar slung over his shoulder, singing "
les temps changer
" ("
The Times They Are A-Changin '
", one of his flagship songs) to an indifferent crowd which closes the album.
"
It was something that we hoped for in the years 1960-1970 and then finally, we are in this time completely upset, which is changing before our eyes and we are at the same time actors and witnesses
", adds the designer.
A Fantastic Time,
a deceptively light album, is signed Charles Berberian and has been available since September 2020.
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