— EDITION & PUBLICATIONS —
TITRE Ma BelleGique #1
— belgian visual poetry
Préface: Philippe Grombeer
64pgs | 21 x 21 cm | created between 2002 & 2013
Home Frit' Home Edition — 2013
— La majorité des images de ce livre se retrouve dans l'édition complète's de 90 poèmes: Ma Bellegique #2
— TITRE EN SAVOIR+
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— MY ARTWORKS —
UNRELEASED
The projects left in my drawers
Ah, these drawers! I hate them. Sliding storage hiding so many projects. Attempts at ideas, unfinished experiments, canceled collaborations, preliminary sketches, and other aborted ventures. Abandoned. Like a dog left by the side of the road during summer vacation. We rarely go back to them. I hate these drawers because I know there are beautiful projects hidden in there. Somewhere between the clutter and the mess. “If it ended up in that drawer, it must not have been good.” That’s often true. But sometimes, all it needed was time to resurface and reveal its potential to exist. Some great projects take patience. My drawers are full of them. I have time. Here are a few that still cling to me.
Mika
¬ Series of photo-montages in collaboration with photographer Michel Clair
55 x 35 cm | unfinalized project | 2020
THE MEETING In love with Michel's worlds, always empty of human presence, often imbued with great solitude and heavy silence. His black and white photos have always inspired me. So I asked him to bring them to life with my characters, and create a story around his settings. We began our collaboration with a few images selected from his immense output. A sort of test to make sure we were on the same wavelength. And we were. It was no longer waves, but a vortex! Unfortunately, his sudden death brought the project to a halt.
Aliénation
¬ Comic book in collaboration with author Thomas Gunzig
Test boards and character studies
Abandoned project | 2019
SYNOPSIS After disappearing for a year, Alice, a teenage girl, returns home. During that year, she was believed dead. Her return is an incredible surprise. She tells how she was abducted by strange beings—though not malicious—and how she eventually managed to escape. Medical examinations are conducted. She appears to be in good health. But she has a strange vertical scar on her abdomen. X-rays and scans reveal nothing. Yet this scar hides a secret: an alien lives inside Alice. An extraterrestrial possessing technology that makes it invisible to medical tests. It was implanted by those who abducted Alice—other aliens. She has just spent a full year in their world (the planet Cosantix), where they taught her that the universe is threatened by a parasite destroying worlds one by one. They send her back to Earth with a mission: to eliminate a parasite that has infected her small town. “The Parasite” is a harmful species traveling across the galaxy, destroying intelligent species on infected planets. It replaces brains with neural larvae capable of making the infected individual appear normal, while they are already at the mercy of the Parasite’s collective consciousness. The alien implanted in Alice’s abdomen can identify infected individuals. Thus, Alice, aided by her internal extraterrestrial, must find and eliminate the infected humans. Alice returns to school and reunites with two close friends to whom she reveals the nature of her mission. But soon she must act: the alien detects that the English teacher is infected. So are Alice’s mother and little brother. And blood soon starts to spill. A veteran police officer nearing retirement and his rather brutal partner are assigned to the investigation. Meanwhile, Alice has only one thought: to return to planet Cosantix, where she lived for a year and fell in love with the man who trained her in combat.
Big Title
¬ Series of photo-montages in collaboration with photographer Michel Clair
The 100 most beautiful thugs
¬ Series of portraits in collaboration with journalist Frédéric Ploquin
2 portraits and test stories for an almanac of the 100 greatest gangsters
55 x 35 cm | abandoned project | 2019
SYNOPSIS From pioneers to the most contemporary figures, here are the hundred crooks who made the history of organized crime. A world tour through a hundred faces to present to the reader these characters who weighed their worth in gold, cocaine, or stacks of cash. The great French gangsters, those who left their mark on the underworld, naturally occupy a prominent place in these portraits, from Cartouche to Bonnot, from the Guérini family to Mesrine. The other major family is that of the Italians and their Italian-American descendants, who invented and developed the mafia, from Salvatori Guiliani to Carlos Gambino, including Lucky Luciano. However, this gallery of outlaw portraits would be incomplete without mentioning the great names of the Jewish mafia, the bosses of Chinese triads, the major Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Serbian, and Indian mobsters, not forgetting the prominent figures of the Latin American cartels. Here are the first two portraits of these most “notorious” gangsters spawned by the planet, presented by Lucas Racasse, the famous Franco-Belgian serial illustrator. The panel of the most unsavory men, whose rise and crimes will be recounted by Frédéric Ploquin, writer and journalist, specialist in crime in all its forms. — F.P.
JACQUES MESRINE Mesrine was not a thug like the others, and few wanted to work with him. Marked by the Algerian War, he was closer to Minute than Libération, and held little love for Arabs. He is the first media gangster of our time. Being noticed mattered more to him than actually getting ahead. Very quickly, he played the media game. Craving the spotlight. Publicity. While most thugs seek silence and discretion, he sought headlines. He even set a trap for a Minute journalist, luring him into a forest cave. All this was punctuated by a book no one knows whether he wrote himself or had subcontracted to a fellow inmate: L’instinct de mort (The Death Instinct). The community grew even more suspicious of him. While others avoided the police except when dealing with them, he challenged Robert Broussard, head of the anti-gang squad, to a duel. It was either him or the cop. Whoever shot first would win. The police pulled out all the stops, precipitating a deadly confrontation. Jacques Mesrine had no time to draw his gun or grenade. He died in his BMW at Porte de Clignancourt on November 2, 1979. His dog was killed too. His partner, Sylvia Jeanjacquot, recovered slowly from her wounds. Sylvia remembers it like yesterday. Sitting down for hot chocolate in a chic, quiet Parisian tearoom, her memory vivid as she recalls “her Jacques”: “I was seduced by his charm, very classy—not in his clothes, because he wore just about anything—a sort of plasterer’s suit, he was on the run after all! No, it was his gentlemanly air that I liked. He approached me several times, wanting to buy me a drink, which I accepted—it was my job, I had no choice. He took his drink, I took my fake champagne. He talked to me about anything and everything. At first, I treated him like any other customer, serving and chatting, that’s all. But he still wanted to take me out to eat, off duty and away from Pigalle. After several refusals, I finally agreed to dine with him. And I never regretted it. When he told me he was Jacques Mesrine, I didn’t quite understand. I asked him who Mesrine was! I must have been the only person in France who didn’t know. He was a bit annoyed. One day, while we were sitting in his little studio, he put a huge stack of press clippings in front of me. He wanted me to know everything, everything, everything! He also needed me to memorize the faces of the cops chasing him. He said to me: “Look at them carefully, there are photos, try to remember them—you never know, if you run into them in the street, they might follow you…” I leafed through a lot of magazines, pictures, tons of magazines. I skimmed through them; there were so many! I was more interested in the facts, the robberies… what he’d done. At that point, I told myself: “I’ve met the man of my life, I’m really in love with him, I love him, I want to follow him, and yet, well, it’s a bit annoying… he’s public enemy number one! In my head, I couldn’t stop thinking about it; I thought it was going to be complicated… Before I met him, I had a normal life—a job, an apartment—and with him I suspected it would be the opposite; he’d always led a crazy life. I accepted everything wholeheartedly, but at the same time I told myself: that’s the way it is, we’ll just have to deal with it. My darling is public enemy number one…” — Frédéric Ploquin
JOAQUIN ‘EL CHAPO’ GUZMÁN El Chapo is small but tough. Standing 1.60 m tall, the “stocky one,” whose real name is Joaquin Guzman Loera, weighs just as much in banknotes: 5 million dollars. That’s the bounty set by the American authorities after his escape from a high-security Mexican prison in 2001, where he was supposed to serve a twenty-year sentence. On the run, this son of a reputedly illiterate peasant and father of nine children from three women has relentlessly climbed the ranks of crime, eventually building the largest cartel in Mexico. An empire praised in dozens of corridos, those popular ballads weaving crowns for the country’s greatest bandits—without a tear for the some 80,000 dead, not counting the 26,000 missing registered since 2007, when the army entered the fight against drug trafficking. Reality feeding legend, El Chapo Guzman grew up in a small village clinging to the mountains of Sinaloa, in northwest Mexico. He took his first steps within the Guadalajara cartel before pushing, from 1990, the creation of a sort of council of local godfathers. But competition was fierce over control of the access routes to the North American market, forcing him to flee to Guatemala, where he was arrested in 1993. A break he used to come back stronger on the field, entering in 2009 the hit parade of the richest men in the world, compiled by the American Forbes magazine. Estimated fortune: one billion dollars. Latest discoveries: plastic bananas stuffed with cocaine. Arrested again in 2014, the “stocky one” managed to escape once more in July 2015, thanks to a 1.5 km tunnel dug by accomplices under the prison. A spectacular coup that damaged the reputation of Mexican political leaders, where everyone knows the close ties between the narcos and state services, starting with the police and the army. “I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana than anyone else in the world,” he boasted to American actor Sean Penn, who came to meet him at his ranch deep in the Mexican jungle. “I have a fleet of submarines, planes, trucks, and boats.” A brag that the baron might have kept to himself, judging by what followed: the actor’s visit helped intelligence services locate El Chapo in Durango state. The end was only a matter of days, and this time, Mexico didn’t hesitate to extradite him to New York, with American justice suspecting him of controlling up to a quarter of the country’s drug market. It remains for the peasant’s son turned drug billionaire to turn his trial into a platform, which he set about doing for four months from November 2018. Target: the Mexican authorities, whom he knows well to be corrupt, especially former president Felipe Calderón and his successor Enrique Peña Nieto, to whom the former Sinaloa cartel boss claims to have paid millions of dollars. Credible, but unprovable. — Frédéric Ploquin
KISS
¬ Just kisses of love
110 x 62 cm | abandoned project | 2017
THE PITCH After painting so many tyrants, crooked politicians and other experts in human filth, I said to myself: "Hey, what if I painted portraits of love? After only two, boredom overwhelmed me.
Monster in love
¬ Portrait series | Dictators and their wives
110 x 62 cm | abandoned project | 2013
THE PITCH What if history's great dictators had chosen love over violence? What would have become of them if they had fashioned poems rather than oppressive regimes, reached out rather than raised their fists? Could love have transformed these dark figures into creators of beauty rather than architects of nightmares? A reflection in which the power of creation overrides that of destruction - something to ponder.
Yan Nemo's adventures
- Le mystère Kosantix' comic strip (project abandoned)
assisted by Robin Yerlès (3d operator)
21 x 34 cm | abandoned project | 2008 > 2013
THE PITCH The Adventures of Yan Nemo is first and foremost a saga. With its hero, heroine, comedian, villain, wife and children, killers, poisoners, bounty hunters, cyborgs, ninjas, cowboys, a priest, a skinner, journalists, living viruses, ... Yan Nemo's adventures are a parody of Hollywood blockbusters and other cinematic platitudes. All the clichés are there, in abundance. With dialogues that are sometimes scathing, sometimes philosophical, sometimes funny, but often appallingly stupid! This project was started in 2008, abandoned, resumed in 2012, and abandoned again in 2013. Here are the first unpublished plates and preparatory studies made, as is often the case, from my friends.
