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From April 11 to May 23, at La Manufacture in Aix-en-Provence, an exhibition of reproductions traces Hugo Pratt’s path through his images and places—a construction in stages that follows the trajectories of a life drawn across continents, encounters and readings.
The exhibition opens with Pratt’s Venetian origins and early works, when he began his career in comics with L’Asso di Picche, already shaped by an international outlook and the influence of American comics. It then moves to 1950s Argentina with pages from Sgt. Kirk and Ernie Pike, defined by strong contrasts and a distinctive narrative rhythm.
The central sections explore the places that most deeply marked his work: the Africa of his youth, which returns in The Scorpions of the Desert and The Ethiopian, and 1960s Europe, between London and Italy, with works ranging from Wheeling to the stories created for Corriere dei Piccoli, such as Ulysses, Sinbad (recently republished by Cong Edizioni) and Treasure Island.
The exhibition unfolds through visual clusters: sequences of pages, large images and textual inserts alternate, creating a reading based on associations, where biography and fiction overlap in a gradual shift from which the figure of Corto Maltese emerges.
The birth of the character, in 1967 with A Ballad of the Salt Sea, marks the balance point of the entire itinerary. Corto is presented as the result of a network of references—literary, geographical and historical. The displayed pages show how the narrative is built through subtraction, leaving space for white, silence and the time of travel.
The exhibition is part of the
Rencontres du 9e art – Aix-en-Provence Comic Art Festival programme
→ https://www.bd-aix.com/2026/04/02/de-hugo-pratt-a-corto-maltese/
