"Sempé manages to make us travel in the heads of the characters"
Francois Morel, the actor, who will continue his tour of "All sailors are singers" in September, has been passionate about the artist since childhood. He tells how the poetry that emanates from his drawings has always marked him.
“I have been a big fan of Sempé for several decades. In the 70s I was about ten years old, my father had a 4L and when he filled up, the petrol station gave us points, and after a certain number of points we received a book by Sempé in pocket size. I loved it but I felt a certain frustration because it was marked on these books that the paperback format did not allow the publication of the largest drawings by Sempé. So as soon as I earned my living I rushed to his albums.
“What I like about him is that his drawings make you dream. He manages to make us imagine what happens before the drawing scene and what will happen after. He manages to make us travel in the heads of the characters. There is one of his drawings that I love: we see a child in a public dump driving a wreck and in his head, he is doing the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
“Three days ago I took a lesson with a singing teacher friend. She has a calendar with a drawing by Sempé for each day. That day, we saw a woman, in her thirties, with her little boy. She looks at him and imagines what he will be later on, a very handsome man with an impeccably tailored suit. The drawing next door shows her thirty years later: her son has grown up, he is not at all what she had imagined and suddenly she thinks of the little boy he was, but embellished by her memory. My friend told me: “It says it all.” And she was right.
“I have all his albums at home. We saw each other several times, we had the same editor. We had lunch two or three times together in this setting. And then he went to the theatre; the first time I saw him was after a show by Jérôme Deschamps , after he came to where I was playing, at Porte-Saint-Martin, at the Théâtre du Rond-Point. He talked a lot about his difficulty in drawing, in finding the right drawing idea. He had two masters in drawing: Chaval and Bosc. During one of our lunches, I told him a story that my friend Olivier Saladin had just told me . He had gone to the museum in Le Havre to see an exhibition by Eugène Bourdin and there were two women, aging and muffled up, in front of a painting, one of them said:"It's way too serene for me." It had pleased him a lot. A few weeks later, I saw that he had depicted this scene in Paris Match . I was quite proud!
“What is wonderful in his drawings is that laughter is not obligatory, there is poetry, and strangeness. In the 50s and 60s, when there was no dialogue or written thought, it was marked "without caption", it's beautiful without a caption; today we leave a blank.
“For me, he was the last representative of pure humor cartoonists.”
Seen in Liberation article by Alexandra Swartzbrod
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