When everything changed, Julien Michaud grabbed a very fine paint marker and a thick paper notebook. Days and pages turned, a drawing on each side. Small pebbles, animals and people, tears and colors drew their world in expansion, in balance.
A dozen notebooks later, some of the inhabitants of this world are already emancipating themselves: Grazia's horoscope has been placed under their troubling and unpredictable sign.
Miniatures in the margin of an unpublished biography, these creatures live today their own lives. They enact and then abolish their plastic laws: flat tints and materials, rings and shadows form temporary systems in front of the whiteness of the paper. They trace their scenarios, their dramas, their loves. They appear and disappear, change colors and masks to the rhythm of a daily chronicle.
Piquant in the manner of the "drôleries" or grotesques, these dreamlike beings that emerge from the plant interlacing of late Gothic manuscripts, Julien Michaud's drawings are not illustrations. Born of an emergency, the fulfillment of a necessary ritual, they have conquered an autonomous existence, which now continues before our eyes.

Text by Claire Guha.

Artist's website