The Artizar Room in La Laguna hosts an exhibition by the British author inspired by silent cinema
The Artizar Room in La Laguna has been hosting since Saturday the exhibition of British artist Dave McKean titled Nitrate II, a name justified because his works are inspired by this material used for making silent films, and because it is the second series with the same theme. The author is well known for his work on the legendary series The Sandman, also adapted for television, for which he created striking covers in its paper format.
Thanks to this series and also his more personal work Cages, a style and body of work has been recognised as “dreamlike and expressionist” which has earned him several accolades, including the prestigious Eisner awards, considered the Oscars of comics. However, he claims that this is something to which “I do not give so much importance, art is not a competition.”
The exhibition organised by the Fundación Canaria Cine + Cómics and the Artizar Room serves to show how the author reinterprets images from silent celluloid, turning them into expressionist pieces made with drawings, collages, and photographs, with a result that always shocks and surprises.
At the same time, it seeks to reclaim this type of cinema, which has mostly disappeared as nitrate is highly flammable and can even ignite spontaneously. It is not surprising that 80% of the works have been lost. Equally disastrous has been the lack of interest these films suffered when sound cinema started almost a century ago, which authors like McKean now reclaim and reinterpret.
The artist openly admits that his major influence is the painter from his country, Francis Bacon, whom he describes as “the greatest British artist of our times. I have always been inspired by him, but of course, if you like expressionism you have to like Bacon.”
The exhibition has travelled a large part of the world, as a result of work developed over the past fifteen years, and its origin comes from the fascination with “the mysterious and the ghostly” he perceived when he watched these films both then and now.
The author draws inspiration from the real images of these films and then subjects them to personal reinterpretation that in some cases is “more conceptual and in others more rooted in reality.” All within a search that aims to “understand why that image seemed so mysterious to me” and then chose it to create these pieces.
McKean indicates that knowledge exists regarding some silent films, and others are cyclically discovered, so each discovery becomes great news for the author and fans of this genre. The artist considers “their disappearance a shame because some are by great directors and therefore should have survived.”
These films are usually found in remote attics or warehouses, but the possibilities of more pieces appearing are still numerous, although at least there is consolation that some photographs still exist which also serve as inspiration. A recent milestone has been the possibility of recovering the film Metropolis for the second time, which had some scattered fragments and has now finally been completed in a more faithful form than the 1984 version.
The exhibition will arrive in Santa Cruz de Tenerife at the end of this year with new pieces since he continuously works on the series or some are sold. His aim is to complete the collection definitively in the coming months, “but I have always been saying the same for a long time, so who knows?”. For instance, he is especially thrilled that the end of this phase coincides with 2027, marking the centenary of the transition from silent to sound cinema.
His style is difficult to explain because it is not exactly painting, nor photography, nor collage, but a mixture of all these forms, “you see real objects and actors on set and then add elements on top” guided solely by his personal perspective. Interestingly, the poor condition of the films, almost always under a layer of dust or chemical damage, works in his favour and gives a greater degree of abstraction to the final result, “which is actually what I love and want to convey.”
Despite McKean confessing he is a jazz fanatic, he has not minded signing several album covers for bands, for example, industrial music, which “I would normally not listen to, but the important thing is finding an emotional connection and in the end, the experience is always interesting,” he concludes.
