You state that you are not concerned about style. You have really developed a styled language that you use for your work in the past two or so years. Do you feel any pressure to do work within that style ever? Style doesn’t come first. When I start working on something, I don’t think ‘oh I should try to use rounded shapes with this color etc.’, I just experiment different things, different tools (photography, vectors, drawing) and I see what happens. That’s why I don’t feel any pressure of any kind. In the future I would like to learn a 3D software, to use more drawing, to mix more and more techniques.
What has been your favorite project and why? I liked working on “L’Arbre Genialogique,” a comic book I made last year. It wasn’t the first time I created characters, but it was the first time I gave them a personality and feelings. And I must say that was magic, because I had so much fun while I was writing and drawing the story. It’s obviously a very different feeling when I’m doing graphic design. When I started it, I didn’t have a clue about if I was able to find a good story, and after a couple a pages, I got the idea. For each page I tried to come up with something surprising, funny.
What keeps you going and motivated from project to project? Trying to get the extra little thing that makes an image a little bit different from what I’ve done before. I want to surprise myself and to have some fun. The best way to get surprised is to mix techniques, for example, illustration and photography. Since any image ends up on a computer, of course, the temptation is strong to mix different tools. The frontier between illustration, typography and photography is melting more and more. Typography can be treated like photo, I can add a drawing on the photo, it’s 100% freedom. It’s getting very interesting now and it’s very easy. But it’s not new. When one sees an issue of the American magazine Fortune from the 1950’s, there were some fantastic spreads with a mix of graphics and photography, it’s very spectacular, especially because at that time they didn’t have any tools to visualize the final result.
If you could stop doing client work, would you? Or do you find client work is necessary both creatively and finically? I think client work is necessary for me because most of the time I’m obliged to make things that I wouldn’t have made and it’s a good way to learn new skills or new ways of seeing. I guess it’s because I’m also a graphic designer, I’m used to dealing with the client’s wishes. But of course it’s important to work with the right clients, and it’s not so easy to find the right ones.
What projects are you currently working on? Some illustrations for commercials. When I’m finished, I want to make an experimental video with Pleix and my second comic book.
Do you have any hobbies? Paintball, parachute jumping, bunji jumping, sky diving, boxing. No seriously, I spend my free time with friends, traveling and meditating. I also enjoy TV, movies, exhibitions and bookshops.
Have you ever shopped for reptiles? Actually yes! It was a long time ago, at a flea market I found a stuffed lizard, 50 cm length, some legs were broken, so I decided to customize it, to replace the missing parts with metallic or plastic elements and to add a kind of engine on his back. I painted the whole thing in grey. The final result is interesting, it’s like a Robocop lizard.
Your life story? I was born in Lyon, France in 1967 and I have been living in Paris for 20 years. I graduated the Arts Deco school (ENSAD) in Paris in 1991. While at school, I worked for a comic book publishing company, and as soon as I finished school (at that time it was the beginning of house music and I was a big fan) I contacted some record companies and I met Eric Morand and Laurent Garnier who were setting up F Communications. From 1991 to 1997 I worked on all of the records for them. I designed for Laurent Garnier, Saint Germain, ScanX, Elegia, Jori Hulkonnen, Nova Nova and many more. It was a great time! Creating record covers is a good way to learn everyting you need to know about graphic design, branding, and packaging. Designing record covers is one of the most exciting jobs to have as a designer, because you have to imagine an image for the music.
Then I met Kuntzel and Deygas in 1995, and made video clips and commercial films with them for awhile - commercial films of Yves Saint Laurent’s perfume “Live Jazz” and music videos of Dimitri from Paris “Sacré Français” and “A Very Stylish Girl” for instance. In 1999, I worked for the Internet start-up Boo.com in Paris and London. While in London, after Boo.com went down, I worked for a short time with Me Company. In 2001, I moved back to Paris. At this moment, I am making more illustration and less graphic design, to set my very own style.
Graphic design is a wide field, there are so many things to learn before making interesting things. For myself, I can say I needed 10 years (after gratuated art school) to feel confident enough to start my own style. When you are specialized in print stuff, I think it’s a great opportunity to learn motion design and/or web design. It’s good for the ego to feel like a beginner and it also gives you other imputs, other ideas for some print works.
When I was in art school, I was making some oil paintings and some weird hyper-realist drawings, my brother was a comic book artist so I was also very influenced by him. But I only started making illustration in the past 3 or 4 years. Before that time, I was more into graphic design (book and packaging lay out, typography). Switching to illustration has been very progressive. I wasn’t very confident at the beginning because I only used Adobe Illustrator as a tool and I wasn’t actually drawing.
I use different image styles. Black and simple characters on some photo background, symetric compositions of photos, decorative shapes, bright colors, simple typography, sense of humour if possible. I try to create some harmony in my imagery. It makes me happy when the work is energetic, not pretentious, simple, and light.
I’m not very interested in style, I’m just trying to build up a world like kids playing with toys, rather than trying to come up with a new style. I’m also very influenced with the tools I’m using (Illustrator, Photoshop, hand drawing). For example, when I’m using Illustrator to create a character, it’s easier to get a simple and symmetrical character because the software is very rigid.
I think mixing is very important. By mixing bitmap and vector shapes, you get some very exciting images. There’s no more gap between photography and illustration now, it’s a very wide and rich field. I use illustration because it’s straightforward and has clear outlines. It’s convenient to use it with typography. It’s more related to childhood, photography is more grown up. Illustration and photography are like the yin and the yang of graphic design, both of them are necessary.
I guess it’s a way to mix the magic and the reality. It’s a way to express the idea that magic stands in the everyday life reality. It is only a question of the way you look at it. Banal objects are given new life. It is my way of rehabilitating the beauty of daily life. If you see a supermarket with the eyes of an extra-terrestrial, it becomes very interesting and even funny.
I also like creating an emotion when I’m working on an image. By creating a character or an atmosphere, I try to make something funny, sad, sweet, in a word emotional, because it creates a link between you, your creation and the viewer. It’s magic.
I like working closely to the people who commission work. I try to guess what they are waiting for me to do (it’s my graphic designer background: the idea of having a problem to solve). When I do some personal work, I am the commissioner, so I always try to challenge myself. I don’t put a lot of difference between commercial or personal work, I just try to do my best.
In general I like to combine elements that shouldn’t be put together: sacred and mundane, big and small, hitech and lowtech, grown up and childhood, rounded and sharp shapes, bitmap and vector images, etc. What’s challenging is to mix all this and to find a kind of harmony, balance. It’s like the yin and the yang, one doesn’t exist without the other. The computer is a very useful tool to mix all this material. I really enjoy this process because I feel like a child playing around with toys.
I’m currently working with Pleix on some projects. It’s a collective that was established in 2001 by six creators including myself. We all met at Kuntzel and Deygas’s atelier and we are all freelancers. Each one of us specialize in a different genre and by sharing talent and ideas we support each other. Right now, I’m so busy on my own projects that I don’t have any free time to collaborate with Pleix but I hope to work with them very soon.