A BOOK REVIEW BY PETER WATERSCHOOT
No Fitzcarraldo.
After a first vision I would have expected to meet a somewhat disturbed frenziesh Fitzcarraldo-Kinski like figure, but instead I shook hands with a timid, introverted, (though heavily tattood, in a quick glance) French guy at the Tipi bookshop, Brussels. Cyril Costilhes was there, together with the dandy, modestly charming staff of Akina books, presenting Cyrils oeuvre called ‘Grand Circle Diego’. Flipping through the book you plunge into a thick blackness. Cyril has fought a personal battle; in a few key words; an ambiguous father-son relationship, Madagascar, a delapidated port-town, casino, accident, bad ending. Thus, having a closer look, page by page, you see that the book is a about someone who needs to share a personal trip, fighting demons of the past, fighting demons of the present. Cyril immediately deliberatly pulls you underwater in an oil-cloth basin. Looking for the spirit of his father, there is something boyish about this book as well. Standing at the shore he is the boy who’ s throwing rocks in the nightblack sea. Circles drift away. We are all sons of our fathers. But this is the kind of place where boys become men. There is a certain butterfly effect feeling in this book, although it wouldn’t be a butterfly, it would be a moth. A moth between the agave, the bush, and that one electric lightbulb. He’s watching circles move wider and wider until disappearance. But nevertheless an audacious statement, because these rings on black oily drab will never disappear. And that’s the beauty of a book. They are made for posterity. They are built to last as long as possible. Hence they keep on talking. Over and over again. Very wide rings. Something to consider when making a book. The more existential stress you might be getting on wanting to make one of these of your own; good! Please suffer!
Rings on black water.
Within the system of wider rings of catastrophe, the horror vacuüm, la maladie, l’ennuie tropicale, the author and the editors are constructing a much more refined subsystem of miniatures, wonderment and aesthetics. The author fights the nightly black with a lightsabre. A lonely knight. I see patterns from the artist tattoos on Cyrils arm, returning in his graphical approach when overexposing shacks, trees, woodshed, and thus creating a mizmaze, a well crafted spider’s web. I suggest you let yourself get caught in that web, and buy the book. It is a beautifully bound hardcover object, which sings a pirate’s gospel from page one till the end. I like it when artist live their art. When you can read in every page of a photobook; this, would have been made, even at last breath.
Silence.
You cannot but relate this book to ‘Heart of Darkness’, there where Conrads book was a queste on how to express anxiety unspeakable of, within a limitated frame of literary language, Grand Circle Diego does the same but mute. It continues this tradition, ad verbatim, but mute as mute can be. In Grand Circle Diego, without the sounds of crickets, behind the various visual impulses, there is the absolute, and nothing but torturing, silence of ‘death before life’.
[Peter Waterschoot, Gent, Belgium, 2014]
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Info:
Grand Circle Diego
CYRIL COSTILHES
Hardcover quarterbound leatherette
144 pages, 81 color plates
16 x 23 cm
Offset UV printing on Munken Polar Rough
First Edition 800 copies
Publisher AKINA Books
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