FIRST FEATURES

First Traits by Philippe Comar is the autobiography, as exciting that elliptical, of a designer, visual artist, theoretician, writer. Memories childhood memories, memories of his student years, memories of visits to the museums are intertwined, in a disorder which, like that of the herbs wild animals that he likes to draw, conceals “a form of secret organization”. Paraphrasing Garry Winogrand – “I know of nothing more mysterious than a "something clearly described" - Philippe Comar formulates what he aims for through his drawing practice: giving a sense of the infinite complexity of each thing visible, human bodies, stones, branches of plants, objects fallen into obsolescence, reflections in a basin. Drawing is for him a way of wearing sustained attention to what surrounds him, a singular way of being world, "without gap," he writes, "between the world around me and the one inside, where it appears to me." This is evidenced, in particular, by a series of drawings that he evokes, made in the tradition of Albrecht Dürer's Large Tuft of Grass: these drawings show a rectangle of land, planted with grass, which slowly rotates until it is seen from above – futile perspective play, but conducts with the same seriousness as the "perspectors" of the Renaissance. If the drawing unfolds the visible, it is, deep down, to "live it more poetically". But Philippe Comar is not only a designer and visual artist; he is also writer. A writer with an elegant pen, without this preventing him from speaking bodies and their secretions with a crudeness that he claims. Because these "first lines" are those that all these people trace since childhood fluids that flow from the body and express its enigma: saliva, milk, tears, urine (like that observed through a glass bottle by a doctor in The Anemic Girl by Samuel van Hoogstraten at the Rijksmuseum), but also ink, thought…