A themed retrospective on the famous illustrator is running at the Hôtel des Arts in Toulon until 4 January 2015.
"I'm not ashamed to say I'm always exploring the same topics," Enki Bilal stated on the eve of the opening of his exhibition at Toulon's Hôtel des Arts. Indeed, this artist is ever true to form: dark in attitude and appearance. Born in Belgrade during the war, expatriated to Paris at age 10, Bilal consistently depicts a grim and anxiety-ridden future that is unfortunately all too close to home. "I'm convinced my years in Eastern Europe determined a huge amount in visual terms. I still remember my playground pockmarked by bullets. When I came to France I already had all that baggage, without realising it." His playground has since become vast and undoubtedly cathartic, comic books being his preferred medium and the one in which he first made his mark in 1979 with The Black Order Brigade that made him known. Ever since, Bilal has been delivering exciting, well-constructed tales, each one a seller. His latest, The Colour of Air, is the final part of his futurist trilogy begun in 2008; it came out in October and sent the comic scene into ecstasies.
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But Bilal employs his unique, unmistakeable style in a range of artistic endeavours: books, theatre, painting, three films plus plans to turn his Animal’z comic book into a film and to adapt American essayist Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. Two years ago the Louvre gave him carte blanche for an exhibition, and a memorable Artcurial auction made him a bankable contemporary French artist. In 2016 Tokyo will dedicate a major retrospective to him in a still-unknown venue. In the meantime, the Toulon exhibition, Oxymore & More, spotlights an artist perpetually on the move, a "hybrid author" as he likes to describe himself: "Because I've been from birth a mixture of Czech mother and Bosnian father. I vary what I do not to get myself known, that's never motivated me, but for the experience, the encounter, the novelty."
Toulon, Hôtel des Arts,
236 bd Maréchal Leclerc – Tél. 04 83 95 18 40
www.hdatoulon.fr
By Mireille Sartore
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