Christophe Simon

Marc Breyne and Alain Huberty are delighted to be hosting an exhibition in their Brussels gallery, from 19 October to 24 November 2018, devoted to works by Christophe Simon. On show will be the original plates of Simon’s new album, Kivu, illustrating a script by Jean Van Hamme and published in Editions du Lombard’s Signé collection. Christophe Simon has also produced a number of oil paintings that are inspired by the crisis faced by women in Kivu, a region that lies in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Before starting work on Kivu, Simon went to the war zone to explore the situation for himself and was deeply shocked by what he discovered. Producing paintings was a way of exorcising the horrors he witnessed and “paying homage to the dignity of the women I met and revealing their suffering and their dignity. If we draw a veil over it, then the rapists have won.”

For a comics author passionate about pictorial art and “who views certain comic strip panels as pictures in their own right, creating paintings is a way of paying homage to certain periods in art history that have exerted a profound influence on me, such as the Italian renaissance, the Second Empire, orientalism and Art Deco,” Simon explains.