Sequential illuminations
(The past and the future through STGM, by Valin Mattheis)
“I was in a printing-house in Hell, and saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.”
(A Memorable Fancy, William Blake)
The emergence of a new narrative form, with its peculiar configuration of the entire universe within the possibility of developing in a plot, demonstrates an amazing effort in making a totality, even with all the tendencies for entropy, to make sense. In the process, many tests and trials are performed — but few are actually useful. Most become a curiosity, the footnote of a possible, but aborted, history. The magic lantern lost its narrative intensity in front of the cinema and became a functional, professorial instrument, the slides projector. The marginal possibilities of the novel remained at the limits of indigence while the exquisite and singular experiences in sequential art structures like Gustave Verbeek work were discarded and ended up occupying a subordinate place in the stable historical continuity of this kind of narrative — intriguing experiences of the past, moments of ecstasy in the visit to the museum of the universal stories. However, there are times when this superficial bore was broken and not only previous experiments were rescued, but discarded ways of telling a story get new chances. It is not just a question of reliving the past, but reimagining the future beyond ways in which normalization and stylistic approval becomes excessive. A moment of breaking with the norm and the search for another future, utopically glimpsed. This is what we could call the Napoleon moment. Undoubtedly, one of these singular moments appears with STGM (“Sic Transit Gloria Mundi”), a very singular work by Valin Mattheis, published by the author/artist himself.
What we call here the “Napoleon moment” — and here we allude to a film, the immense epic of the French filmmaker Abel Gance, released in 1927 — a singular cleavage in the stylistic and ideological continuity of a given semiotic and narrative formulation. In this sense, what we reach with this term is precisely the boldness of experimental — as was done by Gance in his film — solutions of the past and the present, the established and the outdated, in search of new possibilities far away of the more usual methodologies. Mattheis’s work follows exactly that path, in the unique format he chose for STGM — the crossroad between the graphic work and the sequential narrative, between medieval illumination and the subjective language of the flow of consciousness, between the evocation of the ritualistic mystery and the stylized hallucination.
This strange book came my way inadvertently. First, on the recommendation of Forrest Aguirre, one of the most brilliant contemporary occult fiction authors. Soon, I discovered that Mattheis previously had illustrated the jacket of The Varvaros Ascension, an extraordinary occult novel written by Forrest Aguirre himself and published by Mount Abraxas, from Bucharest (reviewed here). Well, this dust jacket, with its mythical elements, was something that drew attention in the book. And that mythical perception is the central focus of STGM, or as the subtitle says: “The Conclusion of the world and what rose after”. The narrative is entirely imagery, in illustrations that occupy full pages. The explanatory texts, in small boxes, lead the reader through the forest of symbols that are the images imagined by Mattheis — who, despite this, have a unique dynamism, with their imposing creatures appearing twisted by the overburdened ambient of each drawing. In this sense, the structuring of Mattheis’ visual narrative is impeccable, innovative, varied, creative; the reader follows the apocalyptic chaos described by both the images and the text, while trying to decipher the flow of strange symbols. The plot begins with a general description of the catastrophe that affects the planet, but soon plunges into a kind of vaguely individual narrative awareness, to cover less general occurrences. Visionary, this narrative structure seems to defy the usual conventions: neither a comic book, nor illustrated book, nor apoalyptic pamphlet, much like the story of the end of the world — but a little bit of all of that.
The book was produced by the author himself, handcrafted, and this brings inevitable marks to the handcrafted production, although Mattheis’ sophisticated art transforms this aura of simplicity, bringing the book closer to a strange artifact out of time/place, an incunabulum produced by digital printing. Anyway, if that was Mattheis’ debut in the sphere of illustrated books, we can only hope for even more ferocious portents in the future.
