The Fantasia exhibition takes its name from Walt Disney's iconic 1940 film. It pays tribute to this classic film, which combines symphonic music and moving images in a sequence of frescoes and thematic chapters. The animated work in the exhibition is inspired by the sequence of panels depicting natural settings. These scenes show the daily life of dinosaurs in a continuous travelling shot.
Set designers have been very important to Antwan Horfee's artistic commitment. His references include the highly influential Don Bluth (from whom we have Fievel and Brisby); the virtuoso of humour Chuck Jones, renowned for his sets and rhythm in animation; Eyvind Earle and his emblematic forests from Sleeping Beauty, 1959.
Set design is highly underestimated as an autonomous art form in cartoons. Horfee sees them as a classic case of the hierarchisation of the arts, and yet he points out that ‘in my opinion, there is an obvious emotional attachment to certain sets, such as Fantasia, 1940, Brisby, 1982, and The Little Dinosaur and the Valley of Wonders, 1988’. These backdrops are made to accommodate action on the front, they are there to easily convey a bucolic, sad or propitious context to focus attention on what we see there, what moves in the foreground, or what intertwines with it. Horfee sees the paintings in this exhibition as part of a process for creating a film. It's one thing to use paint to create a set, but it's quite another to use it to tell a story. The painter himself has his own story to tell, and sometimes he has to free himself from it.
Here, the artist is questioning his ability to describe an atmosphere without automatically tinting it with his signature or his more direct sensibility, as is his wont. It is not necessarily necessary to apply his signature with a resounding or recognisable gesture. This exhibition leads the viewer to see scenic locations, close up or at a distance, precise or in turbulent movement. Visitors may wonder about the absence of a subject, but if they wish, they can also accept that these paintings are self-sufficient. They call on the imagination of each individual, as if to describe a diverse temporality, and become a space dedicated to creativity (especially if they play a role in the animated film). The artist adds: ‘My intention is to make the setting the central subject of this series. I reserve the right not to point the finger at who will be the hero of the scene, a kind of refusal of presential authority’. Once said, this set of painted images should be seen as a theatrical panel ready for use, a cartography in which the spectator's desire to tell himself the fiction of his choice is potentially to be found.
