Christian Montenegro's awesome Kafka illustrations will have you swinging from the rafters

A recent South American edition of Franz Kafka’s Un Artista del Trapecio (English title: First Sorrow ), which concerns a successful but lonely trapeze artist, showcases a talented illustrator at the top of his game.

Christian Montenegro, an Argentina-born artist with a background in comic-production and graphic design, has imbued this publication with an appropriately theatrical quality; flat black backgrounds imply dark cavernous spaces, from which our main character and his peers are suspended in brightly and variously coloured and gradated geometric formations. Montenegro’s use of stark straight lines perhaps evoke interesting and relevant qualities of imprisonment, measurement, and compartmentalisation, but the result is a visual production as composed, pleasing, and harmonious as successfully-rehearsed choreography. Good show.