Allan: Last minute samples
November 11, 2010
“I never played Mario.” That sounds like something you’d tell a priest, shamefully, in a walk-in closet. But I’m not religious, so I’m telling you. Games are probably fun and all, but they’d be eating into precious drawing time and, to be honest, I can’t be bothered.
Still, it’s hard to resist the LEGO-ish charm of an 8-bit Mario, hardly recognisable as a human figure (I could take a stab at the staccato MIDI sound loops hardly being music either, but I’m probably in enough trouble as it is). The crude graphics of the first Super Mario games is a challenge worth taking, as I did in the very soon-to-be-delivered C’est Bon Anthology vol. 13.
With the Panorama pictures I have worked with pencil to wring Mario out of the digital realm and make him a part of my world. Like an ancient occultist invoking a demon manifest itself, but in another spectrum. RGB magic.
The pictures show the same journey for Mario. In the first picture he finds himself in a new world with different rules, every instant captured in a comic book frame. In picture two he floats out of the comic book, and the raster that makes up that world goes along. Picture three finds Mario and his friends in a messy situation as 2D characters in a three-dimensional world.
All that might be a bit hard to pick up from the thumbnail excerpts above. I guess you’ll have to come to tomorrow’s opening and see the actual pictures on show :)
