Welcome to the South American edition of Franz Kafka’s Un Artista del Trapecio (English title: First Sorrow), which displays a successful but lonely trapeze artist, created by a talented illustrator who is becoming a savvy illustrator. Christian Montenegro, an Argentina-born artist with a background in comic-production and graphic design, has imbued this publication with an appropriately theatrical quality: flat black backgrounds imply dark cavernous spaces from which our main character and his peers are suspended in brightly colored gradients with geometric formations. Montenegro’s use of stark straight lines evokes interesting and relevant qualities of imprisonment, measurement, and compartmentalization, but the result is a visual production as composed, pleasing, and harmonious as successfully-rehearsed choreography. [Read more...]