Visit to «Chris Ware. Drawing Is Thinking» with Laura Fernández

Once upon a time, Chris Ware was a boy and all he wanted was to be friends with Charlie Brown. Chris Ware is the artist who has done most for sequential language and the way it can get under our skin. He generates the kind of magical empathy that stops your life from ever being the same again once you’ve read it. He was once a child, and all he wanted was to be friends with Charlie Brown, convinced that the protagonist of the comic strips of Charles Schultz, the man who created Snoopy, existed. In this visit, we’ll journey to the cartoonist’s past—those afternoons in the editorial office of Omaha World-Herald with his mother—and discover his fascination with Schultz and his Peanuts, and how each vignette he draws today comes from somewhere—always powerfully empathetic—that has to do with references as obvious as George Herriman and his Krazy Kat, and Frank King and his Gasoline Alley—with a very special presence in the exhibition—and others that are not so obvious but still very real, such as Edward Hopper, the painter of absorption and interior space. Because Schultz may have, as he says, introduced empathy into comics, and allowed him to take “the step from a mass medium to an artistic and literary medium”, Ware has created a kind of existential transmigration that is pure avant-garde.

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.