Despite architect Robert Schuiten's love of abstract painting, his youngest son has preferred illustration ever since he can recall. Francois' work still shows him as his father's son, however, and to find his peers at rendering imaginary architecture, think of Fuseli. Or look at Winsor McCay's classic comic strip
Little Nemo in Slumberland, with its strange perspectives, scalar contrasts, and delightfully plastic architectonics. That would be more germane, for Schuiten is one of Europe's greatest comics artists, whose Cities of the Fantastic series (e.g.,
The Invisible Frontier, v.2 [BKL O 1 04]), written by Peeters, exploits architecture more impressively than any comics since
Little Nemo. This album of Schuiten's noncomics work--book and magazine illustration, posters, advertising art, exhibition and theatrical designs, etc.--is of a piece with it. Here, mostly drawn with the razor-thin contour lines of his comics, are the panoramas, anthropomorphic buildings, vertiginous aerial views, cyclopean libraries, gasp-inducing conveyances, and model-slim, perfectly proportioned young women that populate his graphic novels. Indisputably some of the finest surrealism this side of Magritte.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Kurzbeschreibung
The art of Francois Schuiten of Cities of the Fantastic fame.