Brecht Evens is undeniably a wunderkind. Barely thirty years old, and the Belgian cartoonist has already won the Prix de l’Audace at the prestigious Angoulême cartoon festival for the absorbing ‘Les Noceurs’, and received widespread critical acclaim for his flamboyant books ‘Les Amateurs’ and ‘Panthère’. Now, Evens is showcasing his latest work at the Galerie Martel, in collaboration with Louis Vuitton’s Travel Book. In it, Evens takes on Paris, a city he’s adopted as his own in recent years and whose streets he’s wandered expressly for this project for over a year.
Starting with just a pad of paper and a box of watercolours, Evens’s sketches manage to really bring the city’s most iconic sites to life, his Notre-Dame cathedral becoming an almost otherworldly presence, while his Eiffel Tower looms ominously over the city (even more so than it does in real life). The predominant theme, however, is the singularity of Parisians themselves. In nearly all the frames, they throng the streets, spilling out of metro stations and bars, while in his night time scenes they endow the city with an almost dream-like quality.
TRANSLATION: FLORA HUDSON
