Chris Ware at Galerie Martel

Architecture, or at least the idea of an architectural approach to reality, is probably what brings us closest to the artistic practice of Chris Ware. It would be too easy to think just of the comic book, without denying the prestige of a discipline that has bestowed all possible prizes and awards on this American author: Harvey, Ignatz, Eisner and Alph'Art.

Judging by the number of admirers — evident at the opening of a new show at the Parisian Galerie Martel, but also during the days that followed, searching for all manner of ephemera — one would say even his game of hide and seek, through the multiple formats, rarefied publications and every type of linear strategy, ends up reinforcing his image as a cult author. The wonderful Acme Novelty Library, now at issue number 20, no longer manages however to contain all his skills. His knowledge and the culture of the classic comic strip that precedes the crisis of the 1950s have suggested strategies that make him a brilliant illustrator. One need only to look at some of Ware's covers for The New Yorker to comprehend his capacity to domesticate the contemporary. His splendid line, the maniacal obsessiveness of the drawings, contain what seems an inexhaustible talent in terms of screenwriting, layout and even the truly minimal number of characters. From Rusty Brown to Lint and Jimmy Corrigan, Ware's is a picture book of unlimited possibilities, dense and absorbing, addictive like a feuilletton from by-gone times. Chris Ware constrains his work in a straitjacket made up of sophisticated pre-cinematographic iconographies that become even more powerful in the digital age.

Ware's new book Building Stories, featured in the exhibition with the inclusion of some of the original drawings, is a magnificent construction. It is extremely physical: one wants to open it up and touch it. It is made of over a dozen different books and pamphlets, all set in the same building: from the architectural plans up to the design of the furniture and extracts from the tabloids; it is a hybrid of publications that goes from sequences that have already appeared in The New York Times Magazine, which run along the lines of the old comic strips in the newspapers, up to a luxury folding pamphlet. It is a Japanese album that is like a jewel. Publishing seems to rise up against the flood of tablets and tyranny of e-books with sad and melancholic characters that overcome the status of loser only thanks to Ware's mystical eye.

In one of the stories, the appearance of an anonymous florist with an artificial leg brings to mind Salinger and his "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" from Nine Stories. Satori (Buddhist revelations) that immerse us in scenes of modern day Ukyo-e, like one of a middle-aged couple in the bedroom: she is naked and awkward with clothes on the floor, he is on the bed with his face and chest lit up by a tablet. It is an image that looks like a very modern Hopper, classic but a long way from cinematographic banality. Building Stories is a book that goes against the "pinch and zoom" of contemporary viewing. Chris Ware's exhibition operates a systematic critique of the fluidity of images slipping into digital. It seems deaf to the beauty of its aesthetic structures yet it is moving, like every tiny trace of handwork on the original drawings. The hand disappears, according to Ware's will, behind the vast work of storytelling of an oral, almost pre-graphic, physicality. The portfolio published for the exhibition by Galerie Mantel includes a fine choice of images: samples from a vast work of rare intensity. Ivo Bonacorsi

Through 4 May 2013
Chris Ware
Galerie Martel
17 rue Martel, Paris