Chaïm Kaliski. « Jim d’Etterbeek »

Exhibition of around a hundred ink drawings taken from a monumental graphic work on the Occupation in Brussels, made up of more than five thousand drawings by Chaïm-Charles Kaliski (1929-2015), a singular figure whose existence was forever marked by the Shoah.

Graphic double of the artist Chaïm Kaliski (1929-2015), Jim d’Etterbeek is the title of this work of drawings on the Occupation in Brussels. The eldest of four children, Chaïm Kaliski was born in Brussels in 1929 into a Polish Jewish family.

His father, Abraham, was a leather goods maker, and his mother, Fradla, a seamstress. The occupation of Belgium in May 1940 upended their lives. After fleeing to France ahead of the advancing Wehrmacht, the Kaliskis returned to the Belgian capital for lack of resources.

A survival then began that bordered on the miraculous, as they escaped checks, denunciations and the great roundup of the Jewish quarter of Cureghem on 3 September 1942. But Abraham was arrested on 12 February 1944.

Fradla then managed to place her youngest children and hid with Chaïm until the Liberation in September 1944. For Chaïm, life stopped on the day of his father’s arrest, a trauma he would relive throughout his entire life.

It was at the age of sixty, in 1989, on the advice of his sister Sarah, herself a painter, that he set out to draw their story, to which he devoted eighteen years, producing thousands of drawings.

The line, at first sight childlike, is nonetheless assured: scenes of arrests and roundups that obsess the artist, forever a “hidden child”, marked by the fear and anguish tied to the images imprinted on his retina.

Largely traced in Indian ink, these harrowing scenes combine text and image.

They consist of “very noisy” drawings that evoke cries of terror, howls, the roar of lorry engines or the clatter of weapons during the roundups, forming a whirlwind to which recurring refrains are added, like haunting litanies.

The viewer discovers a Jewish community heading toward annihilation through the conversations between the artist’s father and the acquaintances he meets during his wanderings.