Strips

Comics are two-state creatures: They begin as rhythm machines and end as flow generators. The comics' illustrator, in difference to the literary author whose words refer to numerous possibilities of ‘world-making’ that are actualized by the reader, aspires to expose the entire diegetic world of his story in a necessarily more static and materialized fashion.  When a text is transformed into a comics-strip it is bound and framed by the images that are chosen by the illustrator, which, unlike the cinematic frames that represent illusory units of movements, present themselves as arriving – each at this very moment.

The insertion of a text into the grid structure of a comics-strip resembles the composition of musical lyrics, at least to the extent that in both arts the rhythm of the text affects the possibilities of its structure. There are some musicians who refrain from composing poetry because it already contains a strict rhythm, and an illustrator, much like a composer, must choose texts that allow him/her to create a grid that suits his/her own temperament and thus illuminate an unseen dimension of the original text. This understanding motivates my choice of unconventional texts – essays and non-prose pieces: I took from the ‘New York Times’  a restaurant review by Frank Bruni and illustrated it in “Yasoo!”; two essayistic columns by Ariel Hirschfeld from the ‘Ha’aretz newspaper’, and illustrated these in “The Courage to Embrace Roses” and “So Maybe There Could Be Autumn Here Too”; and also, from the same newspaper, a short interview with the author Joel Hoffman that I illustrated in “Tie in coffee”. I also included in this exhibition two challenging prose fragments that I illustrated – “The Soup and the Clouds” by Charles Baudelaire and “From the First Notebook” that I took from the Octavo Notebooks by Franz Kafka – that demonstrate my way of working with extremely rich texts.

After I choose a text begins what I think of as the ‘flow’ phase: the text is first disassembled by being hand-written, and, once thus transformed from fact to act, it begins to contra-intuitively serve as the background from which the images shall emerge. These, in turn, form that narrative space as they generate an associative collage that interplays with the text – thus re-assembling it into a new work. The materials I choose are meant to maximize the connectivity of this narrative space – I use large sheets of paper that can fit all the frames at once, thus serving as a sort of ‘platform’, which nonetheless doesn’t necessarily force a single, linear, reading. Once I choose the paper and write down the text, I usually begin to draw from the middle of the paper without any preplanning as to the division of the scenes – slowly covering the paper, and gradually closing all the white spaces. The associative evolution of colors and forms between the frames compete with the unfolding of the narrative – making both movements clash, and demolishing the unidirectional movement of written language. The final result is a sort of illustrated stream of consciousness that contemplates the original text – now untied from its original context and re-associated with my own internal rhythm. 

Katz.pdf (6.18 MB)