Willem at the SoBD ephemeral museum

In a few days, on December 3, 4 and 5, the SoBD deploys its ambitious program of conferences, round tables and exhibitions with the main guest the great Willem as a thematic epicenter. With a key exposition in honor of his guest, composed of original pieces illustrating the different stages of the career of a designer with sometimes black humor, sometimes provocative, always in response to the powerful and their false promises.

Active witness of his time, and in double entry (as a press cartoonist, but also as author of several dozen albums), Willem gives pride of place to strong contrasts and oblique compositions, both literally and figuratively, where the opposition between the background and the characters in the foreground build the intention of an offbeat message escaping the shortcuts of the slogans so loved by strong minds …

His strips in the opinion press in Release, Charlie Hebdo or Screaming metal have left a memorable imprint on the minds of the public, earning them a number of commentaries and critical studies, such as that of Numa Sadoul, longtime comic book biographer and columnist, his co-guest of honor at SoBD.

Willem is not a paragon of decorum. A great satirist of modern societies and their leaders (in the tradition of Claire Bretecher or from Travel), he makes violence, sex, hypocrisy and stupidity, the foundations of his burlesque comedy, where characters belonging to an absurd and grotesque reality parade, but who only show us the hidden side behind appearances and “good manners”.

A scholar of irreverence, Willem is a watchman in these times of dogmatism of all kinds. He reminds us that laughter is the most feared weapon of the powerful. It should not be abandoned under any pretext, especially when they come with the ambition to work, as too often, “for the good of all” …