Juste à temps - Just in time

“The birds, the butterflies and the rats had left. The grass and leaves had withered. The flowers were mere memories. The streets and buildings were vacant. Everyone had gone to the Moon”. This is the apocalyptic image that Tomi Ungerer drew in his last book of images, Juste à Temps (2019). The world is deteriorating at an alarming rate, but the human race persists in its desire to dominate nature. Ungerer, who, right from the start, was obsessed with this sad observation, often depicted landscapes in total decay, featuring collapsed houses, abandoned tractors and tools and harsh relationships between people and animals. Nonetheless, Ungerer was also fascinated by another aspect of nature, which he drew with a rare sensitivity. Throughout his body of work, Ungerer presents this tension between a resolutely political vision of the environmental catastrophe and an approach full of tenderness for nature, between environmental activism and naturalist drawing. This is what this new show highlights, featuring both the travel diaries of the young Ungerer in Lapland and his later collages. Thanks to this loan, the original drawings of the book Juste à Temps can also be discovered.