Philippe Druillet interprète de « Salammbô » : bande dessinée, performance, jeu vidéo et peinture

Résumé

Druillet is a master and an innovator of the art of comics, as well as a versatile and visionary artist. He challenged himself for the first time with Flaubert’s Carthaginian novel when he realized, between 1980 and 1986, three albums, later collected into a single volume (« Salammbô. L’Intégrale »). He was able here to render the thrilling atmosphere of the novel, as well as its «foolish light». After seven years, he worked again on « Salammbô » and its decoration, and produced for Géode the multimedia show « La Bataille de Salammbô », inspired by some of the comics’ tables concerning the battle of Macar, alternated by synthetic images. Ten years later, he challenged himself once again with the same novel, and used another medium: the cultural videogame « Salammbô. Les périls de Carthage » (2003). In this case, he shared the artistic direction of the work with other artists. In 2010, still fascinated by the wild beauty of Salammbô, by the secret that she keeps in her inscrutable eyes, Druillet decided to represent her again. Also this time, he chose another medium and used painting. Thanks to his daring imagination, painting becomes under his hands something incendiary. As emphasizes the title, « Salammbô. Les Nus », the work is composed by forty-four portraits of the heroin and her naked body, where she reveals all her ambivalence: very feminine and lovely on one side, but also close to the divine, with ungraspable and mysterious traits on the other.