For you english speaking art lovers, the title of the article means “Mustache Clad Plumber is Honored in Art Exhibition”.

“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 :)

Jumping Shy Guys

Peach is hungry for adventures

Focusing on the playing itself, the jumping puzzle, and sheer happiness of gaming, I made my three pictures for this Panorama into one adventure. Above are a few details.

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Before posting any thoughts about my Panorama-works, I’d like to show something from the vaults. This is a guest strip I had the honour to do for the insanely skilled Rene Engström’s web comic Anders loves Maria. If you haven’t read ALM yet, you are in for a treat. It’s beautiful and funny and melancholic. With a lot of winks to Mario and his gang.

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First I bought a bunch of the largest pieces of potato I could find in the supermarket. I was lucky, since it seems that the season has generated some pretty big ones. And you need potato excess, since you’re gonna be cutting away without much precision. Chop chop. Then I went to the art store and bought some nice ink colors in the Super Mario palette. You know, screen type colors. Finally I scrambled together knives, boxcutters and a few special cutting tools that I had up my sleeve. The material was assembled, and I was all set.

Then I went medieval on Mario’s ass, so to speak. I chopped out the little guy in the potatoes, gave him an ink bath and let him work his Mario Magic on paper. Turns out he’s just as charming in reality as in virtuality.

But hey! Isn’t the Mushroom supposed to make Mario grow big? Isn’t the star supposed to make him glow and run like greased lightning? And isn’t the Fire Flower supposed to give Mario the power to throw fire balls?

Here’s a few images of the process. Enjoy.

Super Mario is the pixelated hero with a big mustache who eats mushrooms, travels through pipes and throws tortoise shells. Mario started his carreer as a supporting character in the Donkey Konggame, but he soon got the leading role. To this date, he has showed up in more than 200 video games. Many of us still remember the early Mario, when Nintendo was a squarish box, and you had to blow in the game cartridges to make them work.

The artists of C’est Bon Kultur present the third Panorama exhibition in as many years. It started with the oral storytelling tradition through the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood, moved on to the modern novel with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and now we have reached the dawn of the digital age  through Nintendo’s golden boy, Super Mario.

The participating artists are Sofia Falkenhem, Martin Flink, Allan Haverholm, Cin Iwarsson,Sarah Kläpp, Jamil Mani and Elisabeth Nielsen. Each artist makes his/her unique interpretation of Super Mario and his world, by breaking down and building up, pixel by pixel.

Place: Gallery Spegeln, Malmö
Dates: November 12, 2010 – January 16, 2011
Opening/Vernissage: November 12, at 17 hrs, during the comics festival AltCom

/Mattias

Join us as Biograf Spegeln between 18-21 for a last chance to see the exhibition in this form.

This will also be the combined release party for C’est Bon Kultur‘s C’est Bon Anthology vol. 8 and Wormgod‘s Piracy is Liberation 007: Spiders pt 1 (by Mattias Elftorp), and we’ll be showing the film C’est Bon Flashback, which was previously shown during the Malmö Festival this year.

Welcome!