Visit to «Chris Ware. Drawing Is Thinking» with Javier Pérez Andújar

Visiting is walking, looking, thinking. Taking as his starting point the Acme Novelty Books stand, Andújar aims to analyse the artist’s relationship with books and his reading. He’ll be talking about Chris Ware’s books and the relationship between his work and literature, including Proust, Joyce and Perec, but also popular, domestic libraries, made up of department store catalogues and science-fiction novels. He’ll go on to talk about ragtime as the background to and metaphor of his work, about his fidelity to an era, a golden age, embodied in the representation of the architecture of a Chicago that stepped into the 20^th century, inspired by the first comic strips to be published in the press, and syncopated like the most popular, cross-cultural street music of the time. And, finally, he’ll reflect on the graphic thinking of the cartoonist, his thinking as an artist, which systematically sabotages any form of hierarchy, as Ware himself says in an interview: “Power should not appear in any aspect of life.” This journey in three stages sets out to show that artists only belong to their time once they have disappeared. While they’re active, they come from a distant past and live in the future.

With Lateral Views, the CCCB expands the exhibition narrative by means of voices which, in their singularity, help us to look, and look at ourselves, from other viewpoints, turning the exhibition into a living, questioning space that is open to multiple forms of meaning.