Christophe Chabouté

Christophe Chabouté first made a name for himself with Sorcières, in 1998. Chabouté puts every ounce of available expression into a drawing style that proves entirely uncompromising, always working in black and white and leaving his readers free to fill in the colours of their choosing.
Black and white is, quite simply, his trademark. The way Chabouté sees it, the stories he tells are in black and white so as to escape aesthetic and narrative constraints and he only uses colour if it adds something meaningful to the story.
Christophe Chabouté was born in Alsace in 1967 and currently lives on the Île d'Oléron. He has a real knack for filling his panels with the kind of silence which seemed to have disappeared with the death of Hugo Pratt and Didier Comès. He works in ink, excelling in an area despised by the majority of his contemporaries, searching for emotive effects in the depths of his inkwell and never fully satisfied with the results. Far from worrying about accidental blots and spills, he sees such accidents as opening up new graphic possibilities, enabling him to break the rules.
Christophe Chabouté brings sincerity and genuine emotional commitment to his work, coupled with an economy of means. The Angoulême Festival recognised as much in awarding him an Alph Art Coup de Coeur for his intimate story Quelques jours d'été in 1999. Whether he is focusing on the monster Landru or Herman Melville's Moby Dick, his images are never overblown or fussy. Chabouté ploughs his own furrow, enjoying a different visual take on the world which frees us from our habitual ways of seeing and which frees the act of drawing from potential clichés.