When Charles Baudelaire inspires Yslaire
Yslaire (Hislaire, Sylaire or iSlaire), Bernard Hislaire for the civil register, is a multidisciplinary artist whose name is important in the world of the "ninth art", with a body of work that has already sold more than one and a half million copies and been translated into more than ten languages. The artist has exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, both in Europe and Asia, and won some fifteen international awards.
Born in Brussels in 1957 to a father who was a journalist at La Libre Belgique and a mother who was a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Yslaire started working for Spirou magazine at the age of 16, first with various carte blanche and full-length stories, before proposing Bidouille et Violette (1978), the first "melancholy" love story in French-Belgian comics. But it was with Sambre, a cult romantic saga launched in 1986, in association with Balac, that he achieved international fame. Sambre, a very dark and melancholic saga, tells the story of a bourgeois rural family in the 19th century, more specifically that of Bernard Sambre, who is in love with Julie, a young red-eyed vagabond whom his family hates.
In 2021, to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of the cursed poet, Yslaire is publishing "Mademoiselle Baudelaire", which plunges us into the scandalous subject matter of the Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), through the eyes of the main muse of the author of Les Paradis artificiels (Artificial Paradises), his mixed-race mistress Jeanne Duval, the "Black Venus". With this new masterpiece, Yslaire touches upon the sublime with a cartoon that revives the scent of scandal and the raw sexuality of poetry that inspects the invisible and hears the unheard of.