THE TALISMAN

Le Talisman - Simon Liberman - 24 x 17 cm - 184 pages - January 2023 -  €27

 

 

A farandole as grotesque as it is disturbing takes a prisoner to the King: like a resigned and desperate Scheherazade, the prisoner avoids death by telling a story... The story of a soldier stuck in a nameless war. A modern war, removed from any specific context, but cold and chilling, nonetheless. Not a war of fights and explosions, but an empty, white war, where the enemy is already a prisoner, guarded and tortured.
Once the soldier returns home, the slide towards madness becomes more tangible, and from silent ellipses to muted imbalances, the story turns into a strange and suffocating loop, looking like a grimacing cartoon.
Simon Liberman unfolds in these pages his scratched, expressive line, heavy masses, deformed and grotesque characters that all pull us into a rough and very mature universe. The Talisman is a brutal first book, made of enigmatic impressions and striking images, and its bitter taste will linger with us for a long time.

 

SIMON LIBERMAN was born in Paris in 1983. He graduated from Art School Estienne in Paris, then from the Drawing Workshop of the HEAR, Strasbourg in 2009. In 2010, he founded the 2024 editions with Olivier Bron, to went on to pursue a career as an author and editor, while building magnificent exhibitions. The Talisman, in the making for several years, is the first stone of a work marked by the violence of wars and the chaos of traumatic memories.
 

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