This feature is particularly obvious in the works of Alexander Blank. An eternal teenager, this born-storytel- ler draws with a contagious fantasy from childhood memories, filled with skateboards, American comics and science fiction stories and movies. With bluffing virtuosity his works question the idea of shifting identities – as in the Jimmys series which relies both on the historical portrait and jewellery history by renewing the cameo genre – or of the irreducible aspect of the passage of time, as masterfully exemplified by his most recent series of sun-brooches entitled Weather Forecast. The latter, essen- tially inspired by his own childhood drawings, is reminiscent of the experiments of the Cobra group and most of all of the tutelary figure of Paul Klee, who, after having exhumed his child drawings in 1902, made them the fertile ground of his relentless quest for fantasy and spontaneity.

The desire to limit the means and to stylize the forms is probably the most radically expressed by Karin Herwegh’s works. Deeply influenced by antiquity, Tribal arts and Modern art, this artist, initially trained as a fashion designer, has made the choice of her medium a true statement of independence. After having spent some years carving sculpture works in hard wax which were then casted in metal, she has decided to use a simple knife to sculpt pieces of wood, thus allowing to give a larger scale to the human and animal protagonists of her sculptural chronicles accompanied by enigmatic titles : I like it here, An early start, A career in film, etc. A sense of humor and a talent for terse statements that recall the melancholy of Sempé or the clean lines of Richard McGuire’s Sequential Drawings.