Happy Place

In Happy Place, Max Baitinger offers a series of stories about finding harmony in a daily life full of absurdities. Whether it’s proving to your computer that you’re not a robot, paying an exorbitant fee for a gym membership, or dealing with disgruntled customers, the world deployed in this collection is often deceptively pastel.

The character in Happy Place seems to be made of rubber. Long and lithe, his supple legs twist and turn into arabesques, before stiffening a few pages later into long sticks. His malleable body echoes the typography of the chapter headings or the threadlike silhouette of a cigarette. Showing elasticity and adaptability, our good artist man arches his back in a strange dance: from lassitude, he passes to relief, slumps on his chair, lets himself be tormented by sports machines, obeys with attention to the demands of his computer. Max Baitinguer’s drawing is sometimes pictogrammatic, sometimes marshmallowy, tinting the stories of Happy Place with a playful surrealism.