Boarding Corto Maltese at Le Cadran
Iker
A station is the right place to meet Corto Maltese.
At Le Cadran in Liège, the former railway building becomes less an exhibition space than a point of departure. You enter the hall the way a traveler enters a platform: with the quiet expectation that something is about to begin.
The exhibition dedicated to Hugo Pratt does not treat his work as heritage. It treats it as movement.
Original drawings, watercolors, notebooks and fragments of research reveal how Pratt built the world of Corto Maltese: not from fantasy alone, but from reading, travel, memory, and curiosity. Maps blur into stories. Historical figures share space with invented ones. Geography becomes something porous, constantly reimagined.
What appears on the walls is less a comic archive than a way of thinking.
Pratt drew like a traveler writes in a notebook: quickly, precisely, leaving space for silence. His lines move with the confidence of someone who understands that suggestion is stronger than explanation. A harbor appears in a few strokes. A face in three lines. The rest belongs to the reader.
Walking through the exhibition, you realize how contemporary that restraint feels.
Today, culture is saturated with images and commentary. Pratt worked differently. His drawings breathe. They invite the viewer to wander through them the way Corto wanders through the world: alert, ironic, slightly distant.
The setting amplifies the idea. A station is a place of crossings, departures, unfinished journeys. The scenography embraces this symbolism. To enter the exhibition is to embark, becoming a traveler inside Pratt’s imagined geographies.
But the most striking thing is how alive the work feels.
Visitors move slowly between the drawings, as if reading a map that still works. Conversations begin about travel, books, films, cities. Pratt’s references – literature, cinema, geopolitics – slide naturally into the present, reminding us that culture often travels in quiet ways.
You leave with the sensation of having crossed somewhere.
Not an ocean, exactly.
But a certain distance between the world as it is and the world as it might still be imagined.
Hugo Pratt — Géographies imaginaires
26 March – 14 June 2026
