Like music, comics are composed of a divided time: a minute, an hour, a day, a year... And Chris Ware (1967, Omaha, United States) uses streets, party walls, and doors to mark that tempo and create his own ‘beats’ in the form of urban axonometries and sectioned buildings. Each one of his cartoons is a window to the previous instant, and together they compose a map of chained spaces where we are able to see the beginning and the end, as long as the entire sequence takes up one page. Sometimes it is necessary to look at the spread from a distance to grasp what is happening, just as an architect would do trying to understand the lattice pattern of a facade.

Ever since he began drawing, Ware has experimented with narrative language and he has not always approached the architectural analogy literally. His personal sketchbooks, the covers for The New Yorker, and his three essential works – Jimmy Corrigan, Building Stories, and Rusty Brown – reflect a formal and stylistic evolution that the CCCB in Barcelona brings together in the retrospective ‘Drawing is Thinking,’ an exhibition that elucidates the visual virtuosity with which the American artist tackles his own experiences, human emotions, and current issues like racism, consumerism, and politics.

In 1930, Le Corbusier had already claimed that architecture and music were sister disciplines. A hundred years before, Goethe said “architecture is frozen music.” Ware wrote this last phrase down in one of his notebooks, and scribbled that this is the aesthetic key to the development of cartoons as an art form. It is a curious coincidence that the German polymath was the author of the review of the first comic published...[+]