Temps de guerre. Joe Sacco. Martel BXL, Brussels, Belgium. September 19 - October 31, 2026.
Photos taken by Nick Nguyen
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| https://www.galeriemartel.com/2026/joe-sacco/ |
The September 2026 rentrée brought two welcome surprises for comics culture in Brussels: a rare selling exhibition of original art by Joe Sacco at Martel BXL, and the presence of the man himself for the vernissage. For this first monograph exhibition of Sacco's art at their gallery, Rina Zavagli and Simone Mattotti focused on three separate works that directly address the subject of war: The Great War (2011-2013), Sacco of the 617 Squadron (2006), and War on Gaza (2024). The exhibition title "Temps de guerres", translated into English as "Times of War", offers the main thematic framework that binds the display of the complete set of original pages for each of these works across three separate areas of the gallery. This arrangement allowed visitors to not only engage with each piece in the context of its narrative totality, but to also recognize the three different stylistic registers of each work that come together to inform Sacco's unique artistic tone and approach: documentary accuracy, absurdist satire, and political editorial commentary.
The centerpiece of the exhibition was the thirteen drawings that comprised The Great War, which occupied the two front walls of the gallery. A title panel provided a thoughtful introduction to accompany the publication history of the collected pieces. Arranged to be read in its narrative sequence, each drawing was supplemented by short captions underneath that were selections from Sacco's annotations in the published version.
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| Street view looking into Martel BXL's main gallery corridor where the complete pages for THE GREAT WAR were displayed. |
All thirteen drawings were displayed in a double-matte frame that was devoid of any glass, offering visitors the rare pleasure of looking directly at Sacco's incredibly detailed ink draftsmanship unobstructed by a protective (and reflective) layer. These original pages are close in size to their published version so it is fascinating to see the original scale of Sacco's artwork, as well as to experience up close the sheer density of each page loaded with individuated details. These pages also afford the rare opportunity to take note of the traces of choices and revisions, whether in the ghostly form of faintly erased figures, or the cut-out collaged additions.
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| The details of Plate 9 without the greyscale overlay that connoted the night in the published version. |
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| Faint traces of decisions on plate 3 of THE GREAT WAR |
On the right wall of the mid-section of the gallery were the five pages that comprised the short satirical story imagining "Sacco of the 617 Squadron" as a Second World War bomber pilot on a fictitious mission to bomb Tehran. Far removed from the hyper-attention to detail that is omnipresent in The Great War, the looseness of these drawings allows Sacco to call attention to different kinds of absurdity than the ones he drew for the Battle of the Somme. If hyper-realistic deep focus images dominated The Great War, then these pages, with their cartoonish elastic figures and environments, show Sacco swinging his visual and narrative pendulum in the completely opposite direction.
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| Display of the original five pages of "SACCO OF THE 617 SQUADRON" |
Facing these five pages on the opposite wall was the display of the 20 pages of Sacco's commentary about the situation in Gaza in the wake of the October 7 attacks, arranged in the narrative order of their serialization on The Comics Journal website. These pages, which were displayed at Martel Paris at the start of 2026 for a limited time, show Sacco shifting tonal registers again as a counter-point to the two previous (and earlier) works. War on Gaza employs caricature, exaggeration and grotesqueness to provide Sacco with a visual vocabulary to express his political, intellectual and emotional reaction to the event and its ongoing aftermath.
Display of the original twenty pages that comprise WAR ON GAZA
All of the pages for War on Gaza were available for sale individually, though Sacco of the 617 Squadron was sold only as a set. The Great War was also being sold as a complete set, with Martel BXL explicitly stating that they were favoring institutional and museum clients. A signed and numbered seriegraphe reproduction of the third drawing of The Great War, representing plates 3 and 4 in the published version, was available for sale to interested patrons.
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| Seriegraphe of plates 3 and 4 of THE GREAT WAR, signed and numbered by Joe Sacco |
A photo album containing 40 photos taken of the exhibition, including extreme close-ups of pages of The Great War, can be viewed here.
-Nick Nguyen
