LOTO #8: Boule Carrée/Square Ball / Alexis Beauclair

LOTO #8: Boule Carrée/Square Ball / Alexis Beauclair

Books


FA.B133.3158
8 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm
2016
Alexis Beauclair
Softcover. Staple bound (saddle stitched). Risograph printed in blue and black ink. Comic featuring geometric shapes with no accompanying text.

"Google translation of the publisher copy: "'What if I did only what I like most in comics: compose spaces?' Conceiving LOTO from this reflection, in other words freely creating a free work, Alexis Beauclair broke away from the heaviness of the medium (characters, subject, story: all the anecdotal paraphernalia ...) to explore its intimate side, the infrastructure, logic, physical, material laws. In twelve short chapters, LOTO painstakingly describes a series of actions featuring circles, squares, angles in a geometric, almost typographic universe. These minimal but concrete actions (falling, crossing an obstacle, rolling)...engage in the language of comics as much as they do explore and bring it to light.""--50wattsbooks

"French comic Alexis Beauclair’s Boule Carree / Square Ball (2016) is a single color risograph, printed in blue on an off-white paper, which consists of eight pages of grids, each made up of 12 boxes. Each page has a different geometric group that moves and shifts over the course of the 12 panels. The first inner page shows each panel cut nearly in half diagonally with a square and circle that move down the diagonal, almost like they are rolling down the hill from frame to frame. On the next page the square rolls along a circular cutout, then on the next page seems to topple down stairs. On the last page the circle and square appear together again, in the center of more geometrically complex shapes in each panel. My descriptions anthropomorphize these shapes, offering a potential narrative to one that may not be there. Yet, what Beauclair gets at is our ability to read images, the way we read memes and emoji, in a way that is often unrelated to the icon’s literal meaning."--July 24, 2017 review by Megan Liberty for Los Angeles Review of Books, accessed July 10, 2024