A moment lasts only the blink of an eye, but in that blink of an eye is the whole world. Because in just one moment something happens everywhere, millions of times, in many places and with many people.
“If every second that you live yourself, you feel your beating heart, the air in your nose, the weight of your body on the floor, the light in front of your eyes,” writes Rébecca Dautremer, “if at the same moment you think of the think of the countless people who live and breathe around you, those who are near and far, those you know and all the others you can’t even think of,’ well, ‘you might get dizzy , as me”.
The sentence doesn’t seem to want to end, it meanders on and on, you could contract it and unfold it again, like Dautremer’s truly grandiose picture book “A Tiny Little Second”, in which the French illustrator tries to capture the moment. She drew and painted for months and created a giant leporello that is 42 centimeters high and 2.17 meters wide when fully unfolded.
But of course the whole world doesn’t fit in, just a very French, nostalgically shimmering excerpt, with a weekly market, wine and hat shop, library, construction site, election campaign, ice skating and hot air balloon and more than a hundred figures, which are animals disguised as people acts. In the Book of Hours of Jacominus Gainsborough, Dautremer had told the life of a mouse in hidden objects.
This Jacominus is now sitting on the porch playing chess with Amray Cherif, a dandy bird. A hundred protagonists are introduced in the accompanying booklet, from the domineering rhino lady Lisbeth Clovis to the fat Trumpy (!), a boar and entrepreneur who makes money happy. Characters and stories that you can hardly get enough of.
