The beautiful escape

At the beginning of La belle échappée, there is a poster for the Colomiers comic strip festival: a desert landscape that could recall the Argentine Pampas or the foothills of the Andes mountain range, from which stands out a heroine, carrying an umbrella and riding a red horse...

This first poster gave birth to around twenty paintings, like so many invitations to travel, to play truant, to take an unexpected detour.

It was the landscapes that were the starting point for each painting: the first pencil sketches allowed the organization of color relationships and surfaces in a very small format. From these sketches, Anne Laval was able, when she moved to large format and painting, to retain the spontaneity and vibration.

And then came the characters, all women (there is also a little girl): whether they face the viewer or seem to be dreaming about their lives, whether they hold a stick or smoke a cigarette, whether they wear trousers or a colorful dress, a hat or a scarf, a parrot or a quiver, they all anchor the landscape and the gaze.

Each one is in their place, at the starting (or finishing) point of their own adventure and all that remains is to invent it.

" My characters are not tiny, it's the world that is big ," said Sempé.