Jan Schmelcher

A world defined by shadow economy, exoticism, and mystery opens up in the laconic, unconventional drawings and the accompanying fragmentary short texts. Shady deals, absurd life stories, changing identities are hinted at. The protagonists: obscure poets, alligator famers, journalists in exile, wind-surfing mafiosi, businesswomen in the service of the Vatican Bank, elegant men who avoid daylight. And that is just the start of the story. In his drawings, Jan Schmelcher plays a cool, comical game with our fascination with the outsider, with scandal, with unexposed crimes. At the same time, the fact that the individual characters have the effect of prototypes of a milieu study of the demimonde and recall Sixties and Seventies movies constitutes this book’s charm and nostalgic magic. The drawings are accompanied in this book by a short story by Brendan Embser Wattenberg. Applying an ironic, elliptical narrative technique, the author further draws out a narrative thread from The Duarte Files and combines it with a grotesque, fictional artist’s biography.