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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Article: Francisco Sousa Lobo - The Dying Draughtsman
Posted: April 26, 2014
Like a Kafkaesque ‘K’, ‘Francisco Koppens’ is the metafictional persona of the London-based Portuguese artist and writer Francisco Sousa Lobo (above in his photo entitled ‘Booby Trap’). Everything around Koppens seems to be dying: his marriage, his drawing skills, his job prospects, his body, his faith. For him God has changed into a bristly clownface, grinning from the moon or a pitch-black painting. With Portuguese fatalism, Koppens seems ready to end it all, but holds back because he can’t find the style or method to ‘write that goodbye note’. His solitary, secret compulsion is to draw comics telling ‘stories of sex and violence, where the hero undergoes a dreadful tribulation, at the mercy of strong women’. But these instil such shame in him that he draws over them, obscuring and censoring them until they become almost solid black, like a dark monochrome painting. Some of these strips he posts to the Pope, most he tears to pieces. The scraps where the corners of four panels meet form crucifixes, echoing the cross looming over the couple’s loveless double bed. Read my new article about Francisco Sousa Lobo and an exclusive new 2-page strip for ArtReview here…
Read The Blog At The Crossroads here.
