Graphic Expression
The Hand of the Artist: Reading the Embodied Act of Drawing in Narrative Images
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kamil Dukiewicz
Drawing involves movements and gestures of the body, which create marks on the canvas. These marks constitute the basic units of meaning and expression in comics, which, in arrays, form iconic representations. Despite their mass-printed distribution, comics and other graphic narratives maintain their handmade quality and retain the original marks left by the artist’s hand. This unique feature gives the reader access to the intention, experience, and emotion that accompany the embodied act of drawing, making comics a dialogical medium. Focusing on these features, the study explores the narrative and expressive capacity of the artist's hand in fictional genres of graphic narratives, perceiving the bodily experience of the artist (the graphiateur) as the interpretative category, and the iconic representation it creates as the subject. The purpose of this research is to address a gap in comic studies, which have been writer-centric to a large degree, particularly when it comes to the most popular genres. It also emphasizes the significance of the human body in the creation of narrative images, especially in the wake of generative AI and its application in visual media.
The Radiological Image in Contemporary Art: A Sensitive Cartography of Identity
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Johanna Jouhans
An interview with an interventional cardiologist reveals that radiographic imaging can provide information about a patient's sex, age, and level of anxiety. Building on this biometric reading, this study explores whether the same medium, when applied to an artistic object, can also bring out other elements of identity: internal tensions, memory of volume, or affective states. This research draws on a study conducted at the University Hospital of Nantes assessing the radioprotective cabin Novashell, designed to evaluate the diffusion of X-ray radiation and its attenuation. This scientific framework informs a research-creation project situated at the intersection of medical physics and contemporary art. The article focuses on a personal bas-relief artwork that was radiographed in collaboration with a medical physicist. The resulting images were then materialized into volumes using 3D printing. The analysis is enriched by references to the first radiographic image in history (Bertha Röntgen’s hand), to De Meneze’s work on tomographic images of thought, and to the reflections of Jung and Pauli on the relationships between energy, structure, and archetype. These perspectives help conceptualize the forms produced as expressions of an irradiated archetype, at the crossroads of technical gesture and felt experience. Nourished by early feedback from the public, this approach proposes an alternative use of radiological imaging as a plastic and sensitive device for exploring identity.
Writing as Image - the Visual Poetics of Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre?: Image-Text, Calligraphy, and Emotional Expression in a Work of Survival
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sonia Arribas
Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) was a German-Jewish artist who, at the age of 26, was deported and murdered in Auschwitz. Her major work, Life? or Theatre?, created between 1941 and 1942 while in hiding in the South of France, consists of 782 gouaches that combine image, text, and music to narrate her life and inner world. This paper proposes a reading of Life? or Theatre? as, at its core, a tale of love created under extreme conditions. The memory of a past love offers Salomon a psychological anchor, helping her to resist madness and maintain a narrative thread in the face of existential horror. Focusing on a key aspect of her work that remains underexplored—the use of text as image—this study examines how writing and visuality are inseparably linked in Salomon’s art. The handwritten text interacts dialectically with the images, functioning both as narration and emotional expression. Her calligraphy, varying in size, color, and intensity, conveys shifting subjective states and psychological tensions. At times, the text operates like comic-strip dialogue; at others, it fades or intensifies to reflect moments of inner fragmentation or recovery. The text may also appear inscribed within drawn books or paintings, or shaped into visual forms resembling graphic poems. By analyzing the interplay between word and image, this paper explores how Life? or Theatre? enacts a complex poetics of survival, in which artistic creation becomes a vital mode of resistance, memory, and affective expression.
