“L’Année de la comète”, when a meteor tries to connect with volcanoes

L’Année de la comète is an illustration book without words in which the story is built around large images drawn in Indian ink and pen. Illustrator Clément Vuillier traces a chaotic arrival of a star on a planet, between fire and water, volcanic rocks and icy ocean. Published in 2019 at Éditions 2024, the book reveals powerful volcanic explosions, fiery clouds and molten rocks.

“The book begins in the ice and ends in the fire, like an energetic awakening of the planet and its nature” according to its creator. One page after another, L’Année de la comète restores the journey of a meteor, destructive as well as creative. Not a single human soul is visible. The star alone makes volcanoes erupt, glaciers break and tropical forests catch fire after its journey.

Clément Vuillier has a special relationship with rocks. Working close to Paris, he feeds his inspiration during mountain hikes. You’ll never see Clément Vuillier take out a sketchbook by hand. It’s in his studio that he poses his mental images on paper, sometimes even several years after having lived them. “The mountain environment is too powerful to confront me directly. It’s a physical experience, it’s a part of the body and the landscape. The drawing work is only an attempt to retrospectively restate these experiences. It allows to romance and “romanticize” the landscape, and to try to draw a personal image that interests me more than the sketch on the pattern” he explains.

In addition to the rocks, Clément Vuillier, for sure, makes the choice of fire to tell the destruction and the genesis of a new world. On these graphic landscapes, the star collides and creates explosions and lava flows that are reminiscent of the magnetic action of volcanoes. He tells us “It was more obvious graphically and dramatically to move the fire, a symbol of life and destruction”. Between a very current apocalyptic or creation of a new world, L’Année de la comète has several levels of reading and leave the fields free to our imagination.