Studio Visit: Gilles Vranckx

Hidden behind a large menu on Predikherenstraat/rue des Dominicains you will find the front door of the building where Gilles Vranckx is based. The door opens onto a huge stairway that cleaves the whole house in a single austere line before it finally leads, with a striking, elegant curve, to the Brussels illustrator’s floor. Vranckx’s workroom is full of colourful references to the world of the comic strip and to the playful side of pop culture. In addition to the iconic Japanese comic strip Akira, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, the room includes a whole range of action figures, from Osamu Tezuka’s manga cuddly toy Astro Boy to a Freddy Krueger blown in from Elm Street, a robust Predator, ET, and a few spicily tricked-out vintage Barbies with black locks, which his mother buys for him at junk markets. Those Fifties goddesses provide the stardust with which Gilles Vranckx brings his women to life. Les femmes de Gilles are sensual femmes fatales whose elegant lines seduce and rebuff. “The fashion illustrator René Gruau is a major point of reference for me. The covers he drew are extremely stylised and very austere and contain few lines and few colours.”

(© Heleen Rodiers)

For Girl: Now That You’ve Gone, his own graphic novel, which is in the pipeline, Gilles Vranckx has adopted a freer, more spontaneous style. “By working directly with a pen you get an unfinished look, a texture, and a dynamism. I use the computer as a tool, to experiment with filters.” The story is set in Brussels – “my city!”, says Vranckx, who was originally from Kortrijk and studied animation and comic art at Sint-Lukas. “Even back in my third year in secondary school, during a school excursion to Brussels, I knew: I want to live here.”

(© Heleen Rodiers)

Vranckx alternates his own projects with commercial work. He recently finished a commission for Warner; before that, he did the DVD covers for Amer and for some films by Jess Franco, as well as visuals for Lady Linn. He also did the visuals for Offscreen, which he and Dirk Van Extergem set up. Films are his greatest inspiration. His cat has a name with a ring to it: Kubrick. David Lynch appears in one of his drawings as “the man who changed my life”: “I hate him; I regard him as an arnaqueur [a swindler – KS], but at the same time his films have really inspired me. By the way they show how you can look at things, how you hear something, how something can offer inspiration.” Inspiration can sometimes be found in the strangest places. One of Vranckx’s drawings is a self-portrait with a second head detaching itself. My Eternal Struggle in Ink is a reference to his migraine attacks: “Migraine has become part of my life: it is a sort of strange friend. Sometimes it gives you ideas: you think of things you wouldn’t normally think of. Your state of mind is completely different, how you walk, how you see people...” The same way a stairway, hidden away behind a menu, can lead you to a panoramic vista...

Borough : City of Brussels
Exhibition: > 10 March, Les femmes de Gilles, De Stripkever, Mechelen
To look out for: In their four-part comic-strip series The Z-List, Gilles Vranckx and the Canadian comic-strip writer Scott Closter dig up a number of iconic antiheroes with superpowers from American pop culture and send them out to do battle with L Ron Hubbard in an American twilight zone. In Girl: Now That You've Gone Vranckx tracks two women through Brussels.
Info : gillesvranckx.blogspot.com