L'homme armée

Plot

We waited for years. Until now, Frédéric Coché worked essentially his two favorite techniques alternately: small engravings for books, large paintings for exhibitions. His new book, L'homme armee , brilliantly mixes engraving and painting to offer us an epic story out of the ordinary.

It all starts on a battlefield dominated by a man-beast with impressive musculature, a kind of Hulk Hogan whose pink flesh contrasts with the glittering armor of the medieval knights who try in vain to reduce it to thank you. From the first pages, the tone is given: the meeting between engraving and painting allows Frédéric Coché to build a story with multiple pictorial references, from comics to Renaissance paintings. The intrusion of superheroes in a Middle Ages with indefinite contours, timelessly delicately sketched by the fine line of engraving, sees the borders of the kingdom, physical, spiritual and scientific, collapse. Civilization and bestiality, art and violence, death and life are intertwined here as facets to question the ambiguity of human nature.

A work of great formal virtuosity, the armed man is one of those books which, beyond the beauty of the images, artistic references which constitute a history of the very personal Art, offer a universal reflection on our human condition.