Guy DELISLE Rétrospective

Is it because of his background in animation that Guy Delisle’s drawing style is so precise? That his découpages are faultless? That in each new album he experiments with new inking techniques? These are all lines of enquiry that would be worth pursuing, alongside many others. What we do know is that Delisle’s books invariably lift the reader out of his or her everyday life. Whether autobiographical accounts or fictional narratives, all of them have moved beyond the confines of the specialist bookshop to reach out to a wider audience capable of appreciating their universal human appeal. This is the first time that Guy Delisle has agreed to show his work in a gallery setting – to give viewers the chance to uncover his working methods as well as admiring his original pages, with some delightful surprises thrown in.

In tandem with his career in animation, in the 1990s Guy Delisle began creating comics. His first full-length graphic novel, Shenzen, was published by Éditions Association in 2000 and was something of a phenomenon in the field of autobiographical bande dessinée, then undergoing a minor revolution. In the novel, Delisle portrays his daily life as an expatriate with a keen eye for what was going on around him. In Pyongyang, published in 2003, he pursued the same approach. The book was a huge success, both in France and abroad, was translated into 26 languages and narrowly missed spawning a Hollywood film adaptation.

After embracing a life of exile for the purposes of his work, Delisle accompanied his wife (a Médecins Sans Frontières administrator) to other parts of the world, where he took care of their children and produced Chroniques birmanes and Chroniques de Jérusalem, in which he once again assumed the role of observer of extraordinary geopolitical situations. Alongside these works, he also published works of fiction (L'Inspecteur Moroni) and humour (Le Guide du mauvais père) and a children’s book (Louis). In S'enfuir, he adapted the true story of an NGO administrator who was taken hostage in the Caucasus region and succeeded in escaping captivity; he provided the drawings for an album written by Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar in the Dungeons & Dragons series, and he has just produced the biography of Eadweard Muybridge, a pioneer in the field of the photography of motion ... and a murderer (Pour une fraction de seconde).

OPENING
Thursday 27 March 2025
from 6.00 pm to 9.00 pm
in the presence of the artiste

EXHIBITION
From Friday 28 March
to Saturday 24 April 2025

PARIS | Matignon
36 avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris
Wednesday > Saturday 11.00 am - 7.00 pm