COSEY ◊ - Lot 90

COSEY ◊ JONATHAN He who leads the rivers to the sea (T.12), Le Lombard 1997 Original plate no. 42. Signed. India ink on paper 35 × 45.8 cm (13.78 × 18.03 in.) When he created the first Jonathan in 1975, Cosey's image of Tibet was still somewhat fantasized: wide-open spaces, backpacking adventure to the end of the world, the exceptional nature of traveling to "the roof of the world"... When he returned to the series after a ten-year hiatus, during which he lined up graphic novels for the Signé or Aire Libre collections with more contemporary subjects, Cosey realized that he could no longer talk about Tibet in an innocent, Tintin-like way. The subject of this album is the Chinese occupation of the country, the latent acculturation of these peoples, the erasure of their culture, their history, their heritage... We find this political dimension in this plate, where Cosey's graphics, on the other hand, have not changed: they remain luminous, splendid.