It was one of the first authors to have placed the colour at the service of the narrative. The artist, Alex Barber, 68 years, died on the night of Tuesday 29 January, announced the independent publishing house Frémok. He is suffocated in his apartment in his hometown of Saint-Claude, in the Jura, reported the daily lyonnais Progress.
“loud Colors and universe hallucinating, young and crazy wolf-beasts, vices and bassesses common: from its first publications in Charlie mensuel then Hara-Kiri , in the early 80’s, Alex Barbier is surprising, inconvenient, defines the release of the publishing house.
Born in 1950, Alex Barbier was an author, singular. This pioneer of the color direct, has established itself in the pages of Charlie mensuel to the end of the 1970s with stories of sulphur, such as Lyncean s, where it is question of sex between young men or taking drugs hallucinogens. His graphic power, his poetry is brutal, its deconstruction of the narrative devoid of phylacteries in it is an author, avant-garde and sour, like no other.
Ariste non-standard
the One who has mauled the codes of the comic strip, a medium for which he developed what he called “the line blurred,” a style that intertwines figurative and abstract art, “reflects a multiplicity of questions of a sexual nature which brings the children”, said the Angoulême Festival, which has dedicated an exhibition in 2015.
The event has hailed his work, a year after Barber had to say goodbye to the comic strip with the ultimate book the Last band, to dedicate himself entirely to painting. “Barber has made this ultimate book, an object of fantasies of the powerful, and the theatre of all sorts of imaginary events” was the Festival that has presented the originals. The album sets the stage for the daily solitary of the ex-mayor V, condemned to wander the empty rooms of a casino, formerly the lair of his sexual adventures.
In “Last Band”, the ultimate comic strip by Alex Barber, the narrator condemned to wander alone in the rooms desperately empty of a casino, will be confronted with the ghosts of the past. Frémok/ Alex Barbier
For the last case devoted to the artist, editions Frémok held, at the time, to greet the approach of an artist off-standard: “The deconstruction even of the codes of the comic strip has been, for years, the only way for him to say, to exorcise his obsessions, to embody, in its etymological sense (in carne: in the flesh), his fantasies and his sexual experiences. And if this time he considers to have “said it all”, relegating her past adventures in the domain of memory, that is, offering the reader the farewells carried out with the hand of a master, in a true apotheosis of colors.”
