The famous cartoonist Pierre Kroll makes us aware of ecology and the environment in this exhibition in Spa.
Scientific reports, glaciers melting and ocean levels rising, pollution everywhere, the massive disappearance of biodiversity are all unmistakable signs: it is really urgent to act and… to laugh about it! Because humour can either make us aware and encourage us to act or, in a more tragic scenario, it might as well make us accept our next extinction with a good laugh.
In 2019, Pierre Kroll published “des signes qui ne trompent pas” (« signs that do not deceive »), a book with nearly 300 drawings on everything that worries, everything that is in question, everything that needs to change…
This book is now on display, in Spa, at the Tourist Office until the end of December 2022. The exhibition includes the wittiest drawings and the funniest enlarged pages of the book surrounded by a hundred originals of these drawings. Some are 20 years old (it is a bit unsettling to realise that the climate emergency has been going on for so long) and some are very recent.
The exhibition is therefore rich in images, but also in subjects for reflection embellished with touches of humour, sometimes dark, sometimes absurd, but always relevant. An exhibition that can be visited with the pleasure of discovering so much humour but also by reflecting on our nonsense, our responsibilities…
Pierre Kroll is a press cartoonist, well-known in Belgium since the 1980s, but it is important to keep in mind that before becoming a cartoonist, after architectural studies, he had obtained a degree in environmental sciences.
In this exhibition, Kroll shakes us and makes us wonder: with the North Pole melting, will penguins migrate to Spa and enjoy thermal waters?
