So, I was recently contacted by my lovely friend and colleague XTIAN (you may have seen our work together on the world's longest ever digital collage? That work is actually called 'With Uninhibited Fingers For the Unfathomable', but we usually just call it 'The Infinite Collage' because we intend on doing it for the rest of our lives. It's available HERE). He knew I loved his collage comic 'The Micturating Angel', and was wondering if I'd write a foreword for it. Of course I said yes. Oh, and you can download a PDF of volume 1 of 'The Micturating Angel' for free right HERE! What a lovely chap he is!
This is what I wrote:
A Glowing Foreword By Multi-Award-Winning Author Mat Blackwell
“That’s exactly life… my imagination’s playing up again.” – Lucinda
“This is the dream… this is an omen” – Hayley
“Now torment me twice” - Bella
There is no tenacity like the tenacity of a surrealist collage artist.
To do this shit, year after year, to no acclaim and no audience and for no money – lesser mortals would be crushed. Normal people have no idea what it’s like to spend hours, days, weeks, painstakingly cutting out tiny little things and sticking them on other things, arranging, moving, shifting, rearranging, composing, decomposing – and all the while know that no-one else will even look at the finished product, and, if they happen to somehow come across it and actually spend some moments glancing at it, no-one will care. In this modern-day megatopian nanobot media blurscape, every artist knows that their work is competing against far more eyecandied hooks – like a cat that looks like Hitler, or small children smacking themselves in the face with playground equipment – an artist needs to be pretty fucking lucky to get even the most cursory of squints. A surrealist collage artist knows, deep down, that they are only making art for themselves and their small lurching circle of weirdo friends. As a surrealist collage artist myself, I know this firsthand. And yet, I persist.
My dear moustachioed Hungarian friend Xtian takes this tenacity to a whole other level.
Where the rest of us barely have the energy to bring ourselves to make our art at all, Xtian makes entire books of it. And then takes that concept and makes a fucking series out of it. I’m talking multiple volumes here – huge fucking slabs of dense surrealist majesty, shat out like some warped magic goose’s extravagant golden eggs. Literally thousands of collages, is what I’m saying. Each panel is a visionary mélange of weirdness and tits – sinister occult entities and ancient angelic forces battling over the crude three-dimensional lives of mortalkind – and yet Xtian blesses us with panel after panel of this complex polymembranal dada gold, weaving quasi-narrative threads together into a vast hypercolourTM shroud of déjà vu and metaphor. Where other surrealist collage artists take a single snapshot of whimsical third-eye visionquest, Xtian records the whole damn journey.
These monumental half-stories are populated with actual almost-characters, actual almost-plots. You can feel the narrative pulling you, even though it’s impossible to articulate exactly what that narrative might be. Sex, drugs, horses, gymnastics – it has everything. The level of detail is staggering. Each character has their own traits, their own weird habits, their own inexplicable ways of moving through the work. Take the horrifying blackened voice-bubbles of Mr Dick-ring – he only ever speaks in terrifying emptiness…
Which brings me to the dialogue! Oh the dialogue! Xtian has taken the glorious strategy of nearly always deleting words from voice-bubbles that are already there, so the original narrative of the comics he’s working with peeks timidly through – just tiny shards and flickers through the madness, but enough to give the whole work this magical dreamlike half-story, like you could actually understand it if you just read it all again one more time. It’s like how the statue of David was already there, fully-formed, inside a hunk of rock – all the artist needs to do is chip away all the parts that aren’t David and there he is – Xtian applies the same process to the dialogue in these cheesy 1970s comics and WHOOMPH, suddenly we’re left with just the David. Except in Xtian’s vision, David is not some fey bloke in the nuddy, but a riveting dada tale of herbs and nazis and an urgent sin machine and men eating Jack (and of course so much more). It’s a special kind of subtractive dada, and, as a writer of words, I love it so much.
But let’s not forget the visual side either. Xtian doesn’t just cut and paste. Xtian morphs and whirls and shimmies – he erases the boundaries between panels to warp time and space, he takes the narrative form of the comic and turns it into a multidimensional kaleidoscope – in fucking black and white. Does this panel happen after that panel? Does time flow this way or that? Is this character the same person as that character? Didn’t this already happen? In this ridiculous epic, the answer is always yes and no.
Somehow, despite the gruelling level of detail, despite the thankless grind, despite the lack of fawning millions and what should be celebrity status, Xtian carries on. A work as grand and nonsensical and epic as The Micturating Angel should not exist, but yet it does – it does!
Thank fuck for the tenacity of the surrealist collage artist.
Love yer work brah.
MAT BLACKWELL LOCKDOWN, 2021
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