Parallelisms and Collisions

Per Marquard Otzen, Drawing the Line in the Sand, April 2, 2014.

It is the busy back turned to us, which maketh the drawing.


Intense in his (her? its?) own purposefulness, the personification of NATO is drawing the line, which turns out to be just any line in the fickle sand in that a mighty wave is on its way. The head of Putin the Surfer is on the other hand tweaked backwards. This is not a drawing on the violence of the one party. The two of them just happen to live in separate worlds, each following his own intention and purpose.

Per Marquard Otzen has incorporated two sides of a conflict, their respective intentions and how each act upon them, creating a pictorial understanding of how the two never merge or even cooperate. Which is particularly interesting pictorially speaking in a conflict where the flag consists of two panels, two blocks of color, which as flags go, are meant to co-exist, each carrying its own symbolical value and as such remain parallels.

Jørn Villumsen, Civil War is Simmering in Ukraine, April 17, 2014.

JørnVillumsen has created another of his luminous flags constituting a picture plane onto which the whole conflict is being told.

In this case he plays with the actual demarcation line of the Ukranian flag, creating another of whirling smoke choking the dove with its olive branch in the act. The challenging of the color line tells us how fast it can all evolve from that small scene of fire eating itself into the plane.

We always see both eyes of Jørn Villumsen's feathered protagonists. Their rounded, slightly short-sighted bewilderment constitutes a storyline in itself on tumbling through a world, whose logic collides with their own. And when speaking of rounded eyes, caught up in the world around them, there is the shrewd reversal of the color blocks:

Fadi Abou Hassan, The Ukranian Crisis and Failure of the West,
April 16, 2014.

Fadi Abou Hassan opposes two all too well-known figures in Western art history. One for calling out and making it known that what is taking place. The other, however, turns out to be the Angst-ridden West, twisted in agony from hearing that "cry of nature". Enclosed upon itself, the West is letting all of this happen yet again.

- note the hint of the sun in the upper left corner. Hardly noticeable on its own, it effectively putting puts the paralyzed West into perspective. The drowning Ukranian is not even the centre of the very drawing in which she thought, she was given a voice. In that detail alone lies the art of the great cartoonist.

All artworks shown are courtesy of theirs artists and must not be reproduced without their permission.