Oleg

"Well, we'll see about the character's appearance later... For now, I'm imagining it vaguely with my head, it's easier..." Oleg is a cartoonist drawn. His daily life, for more than twenty years, revolves around this: drawing, telling. And all this flows naturally, until now, until these recent days, where creation seems to be stalling, where projects are succeed but the conviction is no longer really there – as if somewhere, "the influx was lost." So Oleg digs, searches and thinks. Around Oleg, there is the big and vast world, fast, changing, modern, destabilizing, inexorable. A self-confessed hermit but an attentive observer, Oleg is the witness despite him of this world in perpetual change, a world which brings its lot of events and surprises, both good and bad. And then above all there is his little world of his own: the woman he has shared his life with for two decades, and their daughter, in full adolescence. Just twenty years after Blue Pills, Frederik Peeters tells his story again but swaps the “I” for the “he”, and, using this avatar that is Oleg, cover your tracks and dodge the trap of triviality. Through these chronicles, alternately funny, incisive, touching, even surprising, he thus (partially) lifts the veil on his profession and his daily life as a designer, and in doing so, points out a number of contradictions that haunt our times: technological ultra-modernity and thought reactionary, cult of superficiality and quest for authenticity, superabundance and dismay. But we can also, quite simply, read Oleg as a beautiful declaration of love that the author makes to those who are closest to him – and as a reminder, devoid of sentimentality, that it is this force which allows us to sublimate the banal, and to stand up to adversity.