In the running in Angoulême: Mary-Pain, when pain takes flesh

“My name is Mary Pain, this is the bus ticket that brought me back here. I didn't throw it away, like that, every time I look at it, it reminds me how much it cost me to make this decision. The tone is set. Mary-Pain, is where she doesn't want to be. This young woman of 34, living in a Spain in crisis, single, without work, without family, "without any plan, without any goal", returns to her native village which she left as a teenager, after a tragic event, to caring for his dying grandfather. The family house is mortgaged, the swimming pool is empty and littered with waste, some villagers do not look favorably on her return, in this ruined landscape the heroine drags her unhappiness. Because Mary pain is only pain. And will not emerge unscathed from this return to basics.

Mary-Pain takes the reader to a Spain shaken by crisis. Unemployment, idleness, alcoholism, social poverty serve as a backdrop to the protagonist's slump. A protagonist described as “lazy, pale and pensive” steeped in guilt and confronted with demons that prevent her from fully living the present moment. Stuck between her painful past and an uncertain future, she throws herself into a psychological wandering where the back and forth between past, present, fantasies and reality intertwine. This state of trance, marked by anguish and sadness, plunges the reader into a baroque universe imbued with dreaminess and metaphorical images that are both disturbing and fascinating.

Mary-Pain finds it difficult to move forward in life hampered by the enormous weight of guilt relating to the death of her mother. His own corpulence reflects this heaviness. Lola Lorente does not skimp on her representation. The designer examines it from every angle, from every angle, giving the work a carnal dimension relayed by a flamboyant, deliciously outrageous line and a powerful black and white. This excess contrasts with an economy of words. Mary-Pain leads us into her drift mainly through images. And the designer rewards the reader with multiple eloquent silent plates.

But it's not all bitterness in this story. The album offers beautiful moments of friendship and lightness when Mary-Pain communicates with the characters who revolve around her. The reunion with her childhood friends, the new encounters, the return of the father who abandoned her as a child, offer delicious moments of dialogue and conviviality and help to bring the young woman back to reality, always distancing her a little further. of his difficulty in existing. His trying return to the past was paradoxically an opportunity. His chance to finally become someone.