Sweet dreams

Charles Burns has never hidden his interest in old, sentimental comics. and adolescent impulses. In Sweet Dreams, the author of Dédales offers us a summary of his favorite themes across around fifty of unpublished illustrations. This series of drawings is inspired by a recurring motif, omnipresent in the romantic comics of the 1950s and 1960s, the image of a young woman in her bed, prey to the torments of love. Burns revisits this kitsch aesthetic by integrating it into its own universe. The dream then becomes the place of all passions. Previously gentle and idyllic, it welcomes now fears, anxieties and fantasies. A massive commercial success in the United States between the 1950s and 1970s, the Romance comics were produced and distributed in the millions of copies. Intended for young girls, they were generally written and drawn by middle-aged men, mostly anonymous. In Sweet Dreams, Charles Burns plays, not without humor, with this masculine gaze which has shaped the collective imagination for a long time, to better question the representation of women in American comics. The image The sweetened image of the innocent young girl thus gives way to more torments. dark, giving back to the unconscious its surrealist letters. Between homage and diversion, this series of illustrations plunges us into dreams disturbing, which exert all their power of fascination.