AMA comic strip by André-Philippe Côté | Ama’s art rush

Known since the 1980s as a daily cartoonist The sun, André-Philippe Côté has been making comics for even longer. In AMAhis first romantic comic strip, he puts his spare and lively style at the service of a well-crafted story which also tells that of art in the last century.

The spirit and style of André-Philippe Côté are immediately recognizable to readers of the newspaper The sunwhere he has worked for decades, and also for those of The Press, where it is regularly published. They are also in AMAan ambitious album of nearly 250 pages which brings more than 40 years of “comedy” practice full circle.

In 2011, he published The graffiti man, a work – his first – which dated from 1980. What was it about? A wordless comic strip drawing on surrealism. Drawing inspiration from the great figures of art constitutes one of the poles of his creation: in 1993, he published Castelloa work nourished by that of Picasso and Giorgio di Chirico, while it is rather the lives of the poets Verlaine and Rimbaud which nourish Victor and River in 2005.

We think a little about the story of Jackson Pollock, icon of American abstract expressionism, and his companion Lee Krasner while reading AMA.

Even more to the explosive couple formed by the sculptors Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin by following the tumultuous relationship between the young artist, who gives her name to the comic strip, and the two men in her life.

“There are a few of these dualities,” André-Philippe Côté immediately recognizes, “but there are still several crossed characters within each of these characters. » He knowingly avoided too direct references, because what interested him was not to tell in a disguised way the trajectory of a particular creator, but that of an artist who “starts from the primary arts and builds on them. goes towards contemporary art.

Free yourself from the rules

Camped in Quebec from the 1930s to the 1990s, AMA tells the story of a young mixed race woman from Tadoussac who, once in Montreal, discovers artistic aspirations. She will spontaneously feel cramped in the academicism embodied by Alfred Leblanc, her first lover, and just as much in the contemporary approach of the second. Ama is a free spirit, whose art will evoke the enslavement of women in Quebec before the Quiet Revolution and environmentalism before the advent of ecological discourses.

André-Philippe Côté chose to feature a woman to mark “the break with the dominant models of male art”. Which obviously highlights the dynamics at work in society.

Here, the social context is not just a backdrop, it constitutes a fundamental element of this story which also deploys a reflection on art, on its role, on freedom and on the nature of ‘artist.

The cartoonist is himself passionate about art. Young, he was drawn to the talent of the painter Eugène Delacroix, whose paintings he could examine at length. He holds in high esteem the cartoonists Hugo Pratt (Corto Maltese) and Moebius (The Incal), and admires the artistic and political vision of the Chinese Ai Weiwei. At the same time, he deplores the fact that what we call contemporary art today has become a kind of very elitist circle.

Even if he doesn’t really like Dali, he recognizes that the whimsical Catalan painter was visionary in the way he created his own myth. He doesn’t find much interesting in the diamond skulls of Damien Hirst or in the inflatable dogs, even giant ones, of Jeff Koons, icons of current art about which the novelist Michel Houellebecq jokes ironically in his novel The map and the territory.

Find your story

Underlying his story, constructed as a journalistic investigation around a supposed love triangle, André-Philippe Côté evokes both the creation of the myth and the appropriation of the work by the eye that looks at it. Heavy, all that? Absolutely not, no, because the cartoonist is a skilled screenwriter who had the brilliant idea of ​​makingAMA an anthropomorphic comic, meaning the people have human bodies, but animal heads.

Not wishing at all to make a historical work or to be bound by architectural veracity, he made numerous more realistic attempts before changing direction and moving closer to animal comics. “It was a complete liberation,” he admits. That was what I was trying to create, which was a metaphor. With characters like that, we know we’re not in the real world. We are like in a fairy tale, in another world where all kinds of things are possible. »

AMA

André-Philippe Côté

Moëlle Graphik

248 pages