Bernard Yslaire - The 20th Heaven Eva Stern

Commitment is at the heart of Bernard Yslaire's work, like a battle, a certainty; an expression of what life is in the eyes of this demanding Belgian artist, a succession of choices for the true self to emerge behind the various masks imposed by social class, society, religion, or family!

Romanticism

In the 19th century, between the Restoration and the July Monarchy, the artistic movement of Romanticism found its first resonances in France. Yslaire's work responds to the formal demands of this school of thought. But it is also in the heart of this historical period, 1830-1870, that he dedicated a large part of his work with "The Sambre War".

Bernard Yslaire - Is God Dead?

Bernard Yslaire - Red Sun

The Historian

Make no mistake, at the heart of the illustrator lives a historian, gifted, talented, and passionate. In his work, he blends content and form without ever separating them. In the midst of a century that foreshadows modernity, animated and definitive in its dissonances, he immerses his characters, the Sambre, and as a true romantic, he presents them to us, making us love them, eternally marked by destiny and their loves that carry them off the beaten path.

The Milestones, the Legacies

From one generation to the next, he describes this France, always on the brink of a revolution that will definitively sweep away the old regime, while seeking the causes of the loyalties and renunciations of the men and women in his story, those who make a choice and then, come what may, see it through to the end. His drawings, oscillating between reds and browns, ambers and passionate vermillions, blend the darkness of a world on the verge of disappearing forever with the flashes of what will soon become the 20th century, even more accelerated, even more deadly...

Bernard Yslaire - The War of the Sambre - Hugo and Iris

Bernard Yslaire - Brussels

The crossing of boundaries

In Yslaire's work, the theme of love is always frenetic, definitive, as only love and revolt can be. With powerful resonances, he invites us to enter the heart of upheaval, the kind that love creates within people by making them lose their usual bearings, and the kind that "deadlines" inscribe in their minds, obstacles on which those who cannot cross into a new morning will founder.

This End of the 20th Century

With *XXe ciel.com*, 1997-2004, Yslaire revisits the century that is leaving us (more than we are leaving it). And it is to a psychoanalyst, Eva Stern, that he attaches this century of blood and tears. Between attempts at rationalization and carnages that remain humanly unjustifiable, he reexamines the absurd that has led us from Sarajevo to Sarajevo in a century of tireless mistakes.

Bernard Yslaire - Unpublished Plate: The Revolution

Bernard Yslaire - Farewell

The Spirit of the Absolute

For Yslaire, while the standards flutter in the wind and the cries rise, century after century, human beings remain unchanged. Heroes of a graphic opera that unfolds before our eyes, unable to find themselves between reason and madness, they wander from attempts to failures. And drawing on the same symbols as Bizet when he wrote Carmen or Verdi when he composed La Traviata, Yslaire makes hearts and souls howl in unison, whether on the cobblestones of a Paris always ready to ignite, or along the quays of San Francisco on the evening of January 31, 2000...

From One Commitment to Another

And the true commitment that resonates in the hearts of Hugo or Bernard, Julie or Eva, is also that which inhabits the supporters of the Commune or the activists of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (The Sky Above Brussels). Romanticism endures, just like this seal of destiny that seems to forever mark Yslaire's characters, bearers of a constantly repeated misfortune, of errors that are reiterated from century to century...

© Texts & Photos: Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES

Bernard Yslaire - The Sky Above Brussels