I admit I had no reference to Thomas Ott’s work before reading Breakdown. Once this dark and troubling road is over, the Swiss artist has a new fan. I immerse myself in the terrifying madness and unhealthy daydream, I go back to the results of this hypnotic experiment, I search for new sensations by searching some of his pictures on the Internet and I officially admit that I am addicted in a different way. In this, Ott confronts the work and exposes it to the reader.
Breakdown, a stressful road that leads nowhere
Ott is a guide to the dark recesses of the human mind through the recesses of the mind that hide the horror and horror. Instant and sharp as a knife, the stories that make up Breakdown push you to the other side of the curtain, revealing another plane of existence where reality makes no sense except in the essence of fantasy. There are only two ways out of that dark place: madness or death.
It’s hard to pigeonhole Breakdown as a horror comic. Indeed, fear is squeezed into these stories, an uncomfortable feeling that plunges the reader into the unknown, where you don’t know how to react. However, there is also room for a true story, a sweaty and dusty black series, and dark and wild humor that can spoil even the most seasoned due to the unexpected.
Ott adopts the short story format for his stories, so that his influence takes center stage. There isn’t much time for character development or complex plots. The Swiss artist mercilessly hits the reader with a macabre and bleak tale, in which loneliness, abandonment and the border between fantasy and reality merge into a dark psychedelic landscape on every broken page.
Although the bleakness of the idea and the dreamlike tone are the main notes of the whole composition, they are different in the stories included in the book. An evening of fantastic road stories, fantastical and desperate science fiction, everything fits the madness drawn by Ott.
The lack of human language in most crash pages adds to the sense of unreality, a disconnect from the characters’ anchoring normality that most of us normally recognize. Creatures in a strange state, ghosts from a twisted dream, walking the fine line between the mundane and the impossible.
For scary scenes
Cityscapes turned into traps, hotel rooms leading to hell, covens alienated from what appears to be a witches’ folktale…the conditions created by Ott’s restless imagination leave a shocking landscape.
Ott finds himself in neglected, abandoned spaces, hiding shadows that we ignore but can glimpse out of the corner of the eye. Hotel rooms, sewers, the stillness of the outdoors, seemingly abandoned streets or the ubiquitous nightspots are a mosaic of situations where the characters collide with their fates.
There is no escape in the stories that make up Breakdown. A last surprising face on the inevitable, the horrible idea that existence is a bad joke, die last joke. Whether clever or bloody, Death highlights the philosophy behind the Swiss artist’s art. Behind the panic is the death, the haunting creatures, the rotting sweat and the silence of people who seem to be swallowed up in a black hole of sorrow.
Fragmentation invites us down the rabbit hole, back into Wonderland. Following the white rabbit in the dark is a path to destruction, to the meaninglessness of reality. Ott shatters conventions about what surrounds us and shatters the comfortable safety of ignorance, making us aware that there are many monsters inside our own heads.
Reading this handful of dark stories will leave you indifferent. A crash enters you, the images flash through your mind for a while.
You will feel the emotional power of Ott’s silence, the power of his vignettes, which make you smell the dust of dirty rooms, listen to the constant drip of the underground in the city, the sound of a chainsaw or the cutting of a knife. the meat. You feel the heat of the covenant fire on your face, the anxiety of closed spaces, the shadow of death in a horrible dream. Ultimately, Ott brings order to the chaos of creation. An order based on a crumbling world’s lack of logic.
I haven’t talked too much about the stories, but I’d rather you guys be the ones to see each descent into hell in a breakdown. I hope you share the feelings I realized after reading it. Understand the incredible beauty of horror embodied in this unclassifiable work. Know yourself as another walker on the dark but exciting path you started when you closed Breakdown.