ILAN MANOUACH

Ilan Manouach, Opuntia Books

Pedro Moura

Opuntia books is a wonderful small publisher of high-end fanzines from Portugal, steered by artist André Lemos. Each new book is increasingly better in terms of production, but the artists published in its catalogue are all fresh, innovative and, even when it`s people with some degree of "career", they attempt something new for them in Opuntia. Feel free to visit its official blog: http://opuntia-books.blogspot.com/.

However, we will focus here on the last book published, Ilan Manouach s a vara do açúcar... Manouach is a young Greek comics artist, and you may look for his work in the third issue of L`Éprouvette (L`Association), La Mort du Cycliste and Les lieux et les choses qui entouraient les gens, desormais (both in La Cinquième Couche), among collective projects and other smaller stuff elsewhere (lately, he`s very dedicated to variations upon Hansens` Petzi). Be ready also for his next book, Frag (also C.C.), which will be available in a few weeks, hopefully. His work is a continuous and increasingly wider, wilder and more complex exploration of the limits of the narrative quality of comics. Most of the books mentioned are definitely comics, with varied degrees of narrativity (Frag will be the least common), but he also publishes things that one would feel more comfortable in calling a "series of drawings" or a "bunch of odd stuff", and forget about the potentiality of reading it as an organised whole, as something that carries a unified meaning.

Well, this book is exactly that. Apparently, due to the lack of an immediate common trait of techniques, style, theme or a plain plot, one who say that this book is a collection of independent drawings. A series, as I said before, not a sequence. (the difference, of course, is that the latter has an organization principle of some sort that the former lacks). I won`t say that considering this book that way is wrong. Actually, for a so-called "objective description" that would be quite accurate. However, I feel that there s something more beneath that surface, even if this is a surface that is hard to break through, and even if the ocean it hides is impassable.

I believe deeply that in a work or art one cannot dissolute what some people call "form" and "content". In analytical terms, it is possible to go up to a certain point, hesitantly, describing and studying only the formal presentation of a work, and then moving on to its themes, subject matter, contents, and so on. Nonetheless, it is only when we absorb the holistic sense of the work of art that that work become alive again: it s as if it lived during the time of its creation, then it crosses for a short moment a limbo of the passage to the universe of the reader and then, finally, when the reader, or spectator, or listener, has the pleasure of enjoying the work, it blossoms completely, it gains the whole span of the life it was promised to it. With each new reading, across time, across readers, it regains and recreates that life.

Accoding to George Steiner (Real Presences), there is no real cumulative movement in works of art, that is to say, there`s no crescendo of the constitutive and (partially) analysable elements (say, phonemes, sentences, lines and blots) until you reach the whole of the work. In other words, there is no traceable and visible shift of differences of degree, but rather a sudden, unanalysable change of nature: in the words of the philosopher, the "gap" between the analysis and the "process of understanding". He also mentions the "incommensurability of the semantic".

A vara do açúcar da meia noite e nos bordos dos peixes (I`ll explain the title below) is one of those works of art from our little invisible territory  invisible within the larger dialog of the arts  which carries in itself that same incommensurability in such a way that, despite its character, makes us understand, makes us look that invisibility. It s as a shining intense white that marks the placement of an absence. This does not mean that there is no meaning in this book. It only means that there is an impossibility of enclosing that meaning.

Still according to the same quoted author, before the crisis which emerged with Modernity, and with the notion that rationality would explain everything and that all the shadows would be dismissed, "Logos and cosmos met". That is to say, there was a somewhat almost direct correspondence between the naming word and the named object. Afterwards, language started to seep into reality as an independent beast, distinguishing everything, explaining everything (i.e., "removing the pleats", the fold, the intervals of knowledgibility): "This voyage is made in and through speech". Ilan Manouach seems to be interested, continuously and cumulatively, in crossing back and forth that language filter in order to reach a semantic space in which those correspondences still (or once again) hold. In historical, cultural terms, it`s impossible to do it innocently, without going through the ideas with which we have been trained all our lives, without using language as an instrument of explanation, even if a metaphorical one (which is always, more than an escape from language, an elucidation). For that reason the Greek author does so in the first place through a deconstruction of language: the tile of this book is the extratextual element through which we first approach any book...

In the cover, what you read is "AAAOCCRA/EAOENSODS/OPIE", letters placed in an odd way. When you turn the cover, you ll find in the first page a variation of the cover`s drawing (some sort of stony cloud, our cloudy stone) and another bunch of disconnected letters, some of them covered by a massive blot of ink. Then you turn to the second page, and you find a second title of sorts: "VRDAUAD/MINTEOBRO/DSEXS". Right. Only if you check carefully the "book credits" will you understand that those letters are the disarrayed letters that spell the full title, in Portuguese, which reads: A vara do açúcar da meia noite e nos bordos dos peixes. Well, grammatically speaking it works in Portuguese but it does not mean a thing, or at least it does not sound it means something in which we can all (the Portuguese-speakers, that is) agree. This is the first step towards deconstruction. Or perhaps it is already the second, given the fact that this is a literal translation of an obscene English sentence. Literally it reads: "the stick of sugar of midnight and in the rims of fishes". But it comes from Midnight sugar sticks in fish lips. If you don`t understand, I won`t explain either. Well, it`s slightly racist, sexist, obscene and even a little stupid. But funny too. Just as obscene and a little stupid as Marcel Duchamp`s play in L.H.O.O.Q.

What we follow in this book is the series (or sequence) of drawing depicting several objects, landscapes, faces, animals, in many techniques where line, colour or printing is concerned. We find human bodies, bath tubs, bodies in tubs, but it seems that none of these characters are, well, characters. They do appear more than once, there seems to be no contact whatsoever between these creatures, the kind of contact that most ordinary styles of comics have used us to. This, though, does not mean that there is no contact.

In the middle of the book, the very central pages, there is a colour drawing (which we reproduce here) of a pair of legs sticking out a bath tub. This drawing in printed in a transparent sheet, so you can see the drawings beneath this one, on one side you see a man (?) with a cloth/mask on top of his head, on the other a smiling woman caressing the chin of what seems to be a tapir. The kind of contact that these images have (and which the reproduction fairly show) is not only two-dimensional, but of the same nature of the contact that is possible between all the images within this booklet. There are lines and blots and colours and figures that seem to reflect each other, that echo in each other, in a muted though direct dialog. It`s as if they were compressed not only on the physical space of the book but also in a world in which the meaning they carry is wholesome. The ocean which we mentioned in the opening of this text. We have to sail against the wind with Manouach, against the winds of a more literal, immediate meaning. We try - perhaps failing now, sometimes doing it right  to follow his zigzag movement that escapes that influence of the normalization. Of course, to attempt this sort of navigation will leave us a little seasick in the beginning, but only after the voyage is finished we will realize how its elements fall into place, crossing the gap, and bring home the notion of its own semantic incommensurability. Even if verbal language fails to cross it and explain it alone.