For Immediate Release
CHRIS WARE
Recent Comic Strip Pages from
The
Acme Novelty Library Series
Carl Hammer Gallery proudly welcomes the genius of
Chris Ware back for
another luminous solo appearance. This newest body of original work
comes mainly from his two most recent publications The Acme Novelty
Library #17 and #18. While most of the superlatives about
the uncanny mastery Ware demonstrates in his story-telling art have
already been said, new insights re his unique personal perspective on
life culls a never-ending stream of new interpretation and
understanding. He is the widely acknowledged giant within this
burgeoning genre. Ware’s brilliance rests on his development of a
language of simple graphics focusing on timelessly simple life
experiences, transforming them into profound and understandable
declarations concerning the human condition.
In a The New Yorker article, October 17, 2005, Graphics
novels come of age, Peter Schjeldahl calls Chris Ware, “the
thirty-seven-year-old Chicagoan Picasso / Braque and young Eliot of
graphic novels, whose “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth”
(2000, Pantheon) is, besides being viciously depressing, the first
formal masterpiece of a medium that he has proved to be unexpectedly
complex and fertile. . . .
Ware exercises an encyclopedic command of literary and cinematic
tactics—stream of consciousness, montage—with tropes that are peculiar
to graphic art: often effects of stillness, such as a character’s blank
takes, in which you sense mental wheels turning (never to any very
propitious end, in this case), and landscapes and cityscapes infused
with a droning dailiness. He speeds and slows time, stops it, and can
even seem to run it backward, revisiting and revising recent events, or
sideways, incorporating alternative accounts of what’s happening. All
this is done with utmost precision.”
Chris Ware’s newest
work demonstrates a complexity and a uniqueness of mind and of a
creative process which is not to be tapped out any time soon. He makes
the most common of day to day life experiences appear fragile, turning
them into awesome realizations of the tenuousness of life itself.
