“I talk all the time,” confides Yves Maillochon to Éric Gauthier as he is showing him and commenting on his drawings. He says he has suffered a lot of blows in his life, especially because of his drug-related acquaintances: “I’m pretty damaged. But it makes for stories to tell—I could go on forever. The problem is that I repeat them all the time! For those who live with me, it means I keep on saying the same things…” When Gauthier points out that this is pretty common, he replies: “Yes, but I’m over the top—I don’t know how my mother could cope with me!”
“The gorilla rule”
Maillochon says that when he was a child, his grandmother forced him to wear glasses because she thought he had the evil eye. “A two-year-old kid, the evil eye!” On his first day in primary school, he wore myopic glasses: “I didn’t see anything.” A neighbor would drive him to school and back home in the evenings: “Sometimes she was making fun, taking advantage of the fact that I didn’t see anything: a pole, a tree…” In hindsight he reckons, “It was because I was looking my grandmother in the face. And you don’t do that. These people are gorillas! ‘Don’t look me in the face or I get mean!’ That’s the gorilla rule! Not very evolved… A rather apish mentality.”
He continues: “When people start by taking away your sight, things are bound to turn bad afterwards. It messes up your writing…” In 1968, Maillochon took first grade again, this time in the Sarthe. “With my brother, we had managed to learn the local dialect. But I was forbidden to speak it! So it’s no surprise that I shouldn’t want to learn English afterwards. Like many kids, I had a mental block. I had problems with French, so I wasn’t going to learn English!” Again, he immediately analyzes: “That was the dyslexic in me speaking. Us, when we have our mind set on something, we try very hard. Maybe we won’t be the best, but we will quickly get to a decent level. But we only do it if we want to, when it interests us—there’s no use trying to force us, it’s useless. If you force us, you merely block us, you traumatize us or make us ask questions that we shouldn’t be asking ourselves…”
Dyslexia is known to be a “learning disorder,” a complex and difficult relationship to language, reading, and writing, but its causes are unknown. There is no doubt, however, that in our normative social and cultural context, this alternative mode of functioning is generally to the disadvantage of the individual suffering from it. Maillochon took up drawing (again) not long ago, when his mother died. “I was alone, so I had to keep busy with something new. Even if it’s not really new. It hasn’t changed much compared to what I was doing when I was fifteen. I picked up at the same level.” He adds: “I still have problems with my hands. Which is normal—if you look carefully, you’ll find a left hand in place of the right hand. I don’t see that…”
“When I’m inside the drawing”
When looking at Maillochon’s drawings, it is worthwhile watching out for recurring characters or motifs, but also for the signature of the artist, which is never where you would expect it. When Gauthier quizzes him about these recurring characters, he replies: “Apart from myself, I can’t really see… Well, yes… motifs as well…” And he starts talking about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, who appear in a drawing because he was listening to a broadcast on public radio. Among the cast of anti-heroes is also a variation around Little Big Man, the main protagonist of the eponymous 1970s anti-western, half native, half white, who does not fit in anywhere. Maillochon recalls: “One day, I saw a girl who couldn’t help but laugh when she saw me… It was funny!” He wondered what he looked like, and that led to “Little Dick Man,” a revisited version of the western character: “A dickhead who can’t keep his hands to himself…” As we browse through the drawing, he is chuckling: “There it is again!”
Then he stops at another character, borrowed from the comics magazine L’Écho des savanes. He explains: “A kind of little monster with a huge cock who fucks everything he comes across. It’s horrible, but people are happy. It’s a bit like Moebius’s Bandard fou (literally, The Crazy Boner): at first, people are chasing him because of what he’s doing, but in the end, they’re chasing him to do what he’s doing!” Another conspicuous protagonist in Maillochon’s collection of anti-heroes.
Le Bandard fou tells the delirious (and edifying) story of an ordinary man who is suddenly struck with a huge erection and has to hide to survive because he is at odds with what is socially accepted—at least on the distant planet invented by Moebius. He is chased by the PAF, the “Police Against Fucking,” loses his job and all his friends. But when he eventually finds protection with a powerful female mythomaniac, the situation shifts: he is no longer asked to hide, but to exhibit in public the object of contention. Now admired for his strangeness, he is once again “accepted” by his utopian society… An interesting metaphor for playing with anti-conformism and social exclusion—which applies to Moebius and Maillochon alike, whose character, incidentally, resembles its “model” merely in terms of the mindset underpinning it.
One is tempted to remind him that in Le Bandard fou, Moebius makes a puzzling distinction between right and left page; indeed, the story develops exclusively on the right pages, whereas the left pages are devoted to uncommented full-page illustrations. Maillochon does not mention it, but it must have caught his attention…
As for Maillochon’s signature, it resembles a small schematized bird, like a delicate hieroglyph, which appears in the motifs of the drawing, hiding between the characters, never in the same place. It has nothing to do with an ostensible, clearly legible signature, traditionally featuring at the bottom right of an artwork. Maillochon does not claim that this game of hide and seek is deliberate, but explains modestly: “When I make my real signature, it almost reads like ‘Mol[l]och’.” He proceeds to draw each letter one by one—“two os, one h, one c, two ls, and one m”—so as to form a small hieroglyph: “A Mol[l]och, normally, is a very powerful animal, yet here it’s only a small bird…” Indeed, one recognizes “the two ls for the wings of the bird,” but “they’re very small, it’s more like a sparrow,” he explains. “The only resemblance to the Moloch is the name, and that’s what I like.”
This hieroglyphic signature also nods to comics. Maillochon reminds that Moebius, before adopting a pseudonym, signed with his real name, Giraud, but by framing the letters G, I, and R with an O. Journalists who didn’t have a clue called him “Gir”! Maillochon also evokes the multiple signatures of Franquin, who drew his name at the bottom of the cartoon frames and ornated it differently according to the contents of the frame. Incidentally, Maillochon’s signature also varies, as he sometimes adds a small tear to his sparrow…
Maillochon is thus present in his drawings in many ways. But when he says, “I’m in the drawing,” it’s a different story. He explains that he has “no distance,” all the more so as he draws with the sheet of paper or wooden board resting on his lap. In other words, he tries not to see, or rather to see differently. Our man has already given us numerous keys for interpretation, at the risk of being mistaken or hallucinating…
“It’s the wooden board that decides for me”
Maillochon works with felt pen on paper, and on wood with felt pen too or with a woodburning pen (until the day he will lend his instrument to someone ill-intentioned). In the surgery of his addictologist hangs a pyrography portrait of Freud on a cigar box—quite appropriate, as the inventor of psychoanalysis was a big cigar smoker—a rather “classic” portrait, not at all in Maillochon’s “style”: “I sometimes use models. This was stressful to do. The woodburning pen wasn’t working properly.” He spots “marks that shouldn’t be there”: “Some things went wrong…” Yet Maillochon knows very well how to exploit accidents or defects—a reflex common to many artists who know how to extract or invent shapes out of formlessness… Pointing at a series of wooden boards covered with drawings, he comments: “You see, this is what can happen: I didn’t decide to put eyes in there—they just happened to be there!” While drawing, he plays with the color nuances of the wood: “It’s the wood that decides, and that’s what I like about it. It’s the wooden board that decides for me. I feel like I see things on the board, things that maybe only I can see.”
His drawings on paper are often “prepared,” that is, first drawn in pencil before being filled in with felt pen. They start with a character: “In general, that’s what I find first, because it’s an entity, and the others gravitate around him.” He points out that the protagonist can be a dog too. Or isolated details—“coffee, some joints, a bottle of methadone”—or repeated motifs that dominate the rest of the composition to the point of becoming the main subject: “You wonder where these tails come from, but it’s not big deal! I just like it.”
When, in a given drawing, there are no traces of pencil underneath the color, it means that “it went off by itself,” says Maillochon. He adds that in general he has no preconceived idea when he starts a drawing and that once he has begun to draw, he does not stop. Sometimes “it takes time to do.” Because he likes to “fill in a lot.” But the most saturated drawings are the most difficult to get right, “because they have to remain legible after all.” When there is a lot going on—and this is often the case—the narrative dimension clearly comes into its own. And Maillochon loves to tell stories: “This one started on a notebook. It’s the same, only cleaner. Funny story!” He remembers a “very weird house” full of stairs, full of doors, a party, a girl he was supposed to join in a room: “There’s a door I never found. It’s the one I should have found!”
“There aren’t many people nowadays who want to understand history”
Maillochon sometimes stages himself in biographical or intimate stories, but occasionally his drawings are underpinned by more political narratives. The word “YES” appears quite often in his drawings: “I call YES the 0.1% of mankind that dominates the world”—Y for yen, E for euro and S for dollar… And what’s going on here? “A broadcast on public radio about an estate where gypsies were allowed to settle down, and in the end they’re the only ones left, because no one can cope with their way of life…” And there? “I was angry at that time, I held a grudge against Macron.”
And then there are the Gauls fighting the Romans, paralleled with the Algerians and the French, World War II, the fake story of the “unescorted aircraft carrier” at Pearl Harbor, “the wars that all begin with lies,” the Russians in Afghanistan: “In that region, knowing your history is dangerous—just ask the Yemenis!” Is Maillochon a history buff? “No, it’s only since I’ve been listening to public radio that I’ve been interested in history. But there aren’t many people nowadays who want to understand history… otherwise things wouldn’t be so bad on Earth.”
Maillochon’s interest in animals is also inflected by a historical, political perspective: “Here, I didn’t bother with the details, since they will all disappear anyway. Yes, the big mammals will all disappear. We are part of them, I can’t see why people don’t understand… We are the mammals coming after all those mammals—if they don’t resist, I don’t see how we could resist. We are the last ones.” Personal stories, the history of the world, men and animals, the living—everything is there, but reworked in the manner of Maillochon.
In the manner of comic strips? Rather inspired by the spirit of comic strips, as a sort of tribute to our childhood shelters, from Walt Disney and animal magazines [such as La Hulotte] through to everything that comes close to a graphic novel: Tinker Bell, “which he has drawn from all angles,” the little Egyptian, “an old character in Dupuis,” Gomez’s owl, his toad in a jar and his way of drawing a raven, which “he stole from Tardi” or from “a scout’s book with beautiful animal drawings.” But it’s a bygone era: “I was still using models at that time. But not anymore, as it strains my eyes.”
About one of his characters, he says: “He’s somewhat melancholy, right? Yes, that’s what he is.” About another: “I really like this character. He appeared out of nowhere. He’s funny. He’s got one hell of a face. Right, that’s exactly it, he has a specific physiognomy.” This is also what you say to yourself when looking at a drawing by Maillochon: I really like that one there, because it tells a strange story and does so in a very “specific” way that resonates with the author’s unique way of talking. You are inside the drawing—there is no longer any right or left, you do not see anything anymore, because you do not have any distance. You have to let yourself go and slip in between… And Maillochon knows he found “his thing,” his own way: “There too, I used a model. Little dots, it’s not my style.”
Céline Delavaux, November 2019
English translation by Patrick Kremer