Mr Garcin – Clermont-Ferrand

In 2012, one of Mr. Garcin's works was used by Marvel as the cover for issue #700 of The Amazing Spider-Man. It's an impressive collage, bringing together all the characters cut directly from the printed adventures of the character to unite them into a gigantic Spider-Man eye. This initial recognition was no accident: it crowned a long-standing passion and a reappropriation of contemporary pop culture icons that goes beyond a mere citation effect tending towards cynical re-exploitation.

Mr. Garcin has been cutting and reassembling comics since childhood, like a sort of graphic DJ. He finds his inspiration in the plethora of comic book productions that have shaped recent generations, populated by heroes who represent an ideal of justice and morality, and who have begun to age along with their fans – let's not forget, for example, that Batman is now 77 years old.

Abandoning the vision of the adventurous and conquering superman of his youth, Mr. Garcin began to focus his attention on the purely graphic dimension of his productions, emphasizing their manufacturing processes as well as their paratexts, and the emotional identification created in readers. He then deepened his approach to embrace a new dimension of superhero perception, which serves as a critical extension of the contemporary mythology created through them. By populating his work and his reinterpretations with their multiple appearances and figures, Mr. Garcin brings to life more than a tradition: he constructs a graphic discourse on the repetition, the infinite transformation of these characters who have evolved with the times while maintaining a unique form due to their visual signature, as recognizable as a brand.

His desire to translate the entirety of their historical journeys into oversized stained-glass windows that the viewer can take in at a single glance brings to life the sacred character of these figures today. In this, Mr. Garcin echoes the informational saturation characteristic of our era and the overrepresentation associated with it. We are confronted with both the aging of worn-out heroes and their transformation into empty, omnipresent symbols of an emotional attachment that is all the more palpable because the artist does nothing to conceal the traces of his making, the emotional reappropriation of bygone eras to return to the unsurpassable nature of the form. The graphically striking dimension of these forms born from accumulation recalls both the monstrosity and the power of these "logos" that now hold more weight in uniting us than political messages of any kind. In this, Mr. Garcin plays less the role of a praiser than a social revealer.

Following his initial successes, his works have been featured in numerous group exhibitions, and a solo show was dedicated to him in 2015 at the Arludik gallery in Paris, a sign of the public's growing interest in his practice.

Text by Michael Verger