Piotr Barsony publishes with Intervalles editions, I don’t know how to put it, the word masterpiece being so overused, and the modesty of the feat so elegantly coupled with quiet audacity, delicate relevance, that… Anyway, his Ideal man is wonderful. At 75, the author resurrects his hero, Marc Edito, to whom he gave birth in The Echo of the Savannas in 1985 and whose social adventures he continued, irregularly, until 1991. Who still remembers it today deserves a free subscription to bdoublies.com.
Dandy alert straight out of a Thierry Mugler parade, masked, crowned, half tango, half mytho, half maso, and if there is a piece left, I would take a pinch of staccato, Marc Edito advocated “information First of all”. I just ordered it. I should wait to have received it to comment on the evolution, in thirty-five years, of the genius of the author, but the impatience, the excitement, the enthusiasm of the proselyte are the strongest. I will not talk about the memories I have of it, since no longer being a reader of The Echo of the Savannas since 1982, I have completely missed Piotr’s soap opera. And it is therefore devoid of any reference and freed from all unreasonable comparisons that I discovered this second opus.
The album of more than 200 pages came into my hands thanks to the children of an old friend who came to have dinner at the house. Magnificent young people whom I saw being born, whom we, Dora and I, lost sight of at the time of this age of ingratitude which we call adolescence, and who come back to us, like a balm of youth. They are beautiful as we were, they have heartaches that they do not confide any more than we did, they see their youth getting the hell out of them, and they want to make movies, just like us. Besides, they do it like we did at their age, and it’s not sure that it works better for them…
I was angry with the youngest, arriving an hour late. A rudeness that risked drying out my beef bourguignon. But it was she who arrived with The ideal man under the arm. “Is it to make you forgive? So show off!”
The mystery of a lost manhood
Barely opened, a flash of colors and materials, as if we had invented a printing technique of the genre, it’s not in relief, it’s even better. I’m dazzled, and in the process, I meet this green-skinned guy in his metal blue suit, his golden crown. In three randomly picked speech bubbles, I understand that the verb is also first class. Orange, blue, mauve, funny, brief, scathing, it’s a pearl, a bomb, a treat. Image and sound, it shines and it bursts at the same time. A clear line in the service of a hyperrealism in perfect adequacy with burlesque dialogues, situations as asocial as tasting caviar in front of the Zambezi falls (that’s not there but it could).
The story, I’ll make it short: our “ideal man”, this fashion plate, is powerless. It hits him on the first page. He saw the thing with more astonishment than dismay, but still anxious to find a remedy, “a helping hand”. All the erotic suspense of the company is based on the mystery of this lost virility, which Marc Edito is now looking for in the folds of a burqa, raised thanks to a passage on an air vent, in the manner of Marilyn .
Pursued by Daesh, then by the neo-Nazis, he came across a taxi which spoke to him about Marcel Duchamp and exhibited his work on the “crucifiction” at the FIAC. In this very personal and autobiographical redefinition of the hero, Piotr Barsony creates a character who has no opinion, delivers no message, crosses the city without trying to save the world. Invulnerability takes the place of ethics. He heard that in Scandinavia there are sexual assistants who, with a helping hand… So we hope for the continuation.