Artists From France

"My aim is not to charm, but to be true; my art is to say all."

"That was a really bad week: [I] had to spend a lot of money and my productivity was totally ruined."

"I'll never regret making Pepper&Carrot so open."

"I'm really happy if Pepper & Carrot can bring more money for external people."

"It's a dream come true! Every artist I know would love to make their own comics. Would love to get paid for making it, and to keep the control of it, about the stories, about the heart."

"Before 2000 [and the internet], you had to pay for a book or go to exhibitions to see new artworks. And suddenly many artists were on the internet, and you could see thousands of artworks daily."

"Managing everything on this project is hard and challenging, but extremely rewarding on a personal level. Pepper&Carrot is the project of my dreams."

"The names of the characters in Pepper & Carrot all actually follow the names of plants, herbs, and for the animals that accompany them, vegetable names. So for all the spice names, what inspired me was simply going to do my shopping at the traditional market, there are always grocers' stalls, and then I saw 'coriander', I saw 'saffron', I saw 'pepper', and there it was. There was 'poivre' but in French it sounded too much like 'poivrot'. So I said to myself "We're going to avoid 'poivrot' and 'carrot'", which didn't work very well, which is why I kept the English 'Pepper'."

"Even if my main product is webcomics, I know that there's a whole generation for whom a real author is someone who makes books."

"I work in political/editorial cartoon but also in children’s book illustration. They are 2 different genres, but I like changing from time to time what kind of topics I’m working on. According to my mood I will spend more time in one or another genre.I like to denounce with my cartoons, but sometimes it is also good to put some poetry in this complicated world and the children illustrations help me to focus in something more positive."

"I’ve been drawing since childhood but I studied economics instead of art, I was really interested in political news and geopolitics. My favourite topic is political drawing/cartoon. It is a perfect way to combine my 2 passions: my interest for the news and my drawing skills."

"In the political-cartoons genre I like Ares and (Angel) Boligan´s work for their graphic style. I also admire the work of Quino…In children´s illustration, I could give a lot of names also but if I had to choose only one I can say I really admire the work of Rebecca Dautremer. I’m fascinated by her work."

"Our roots are in the depths of the woods-on the banks of streams and among the mosses."

"The aim of my work: The study of nature, the love of nature's art,and the need to express what one feels in one's heart."

"Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige."

"Partir, c'est mourir un peu... mais mourir, c'est partir beaucoup."

"Marche Funèbre composée pour les Funérailles d'un grand homme sourd."

"André Breton's poetry is a poetry of happiness. It ignores neither the anguish nor the maledictions that haunted the nightmares of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, but it goes beyond them and resolves them. Breton, like Rimbaud, is a "seer," but he does not allow himself to be hypnotized by the terrible visions of the Rimbaldian hell. Even in horror and despair, Breton knows how to discern the subterranean springs of joy. Despair? It "enchants" him! His own life? The most serious question! And yet, he knows how to attach no importance to it. For him, death is "pink," and all the mysterious aspects of existence are illuminated by his penetrating gaze-all contradictions, all mysteries. Supreme reward of that supreme science: Poetry."

"I had always believed in Andre Breton's freedom, to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels in thinks, to follow sensations and absurd correlations of events and images, to trust to the new realms they lead one into. "The cult of the marvelous." Also the cult of the unconscious leadership, the cult of mystery, the evasion of false logic. The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud. It is not madness. It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by the rational mind."

"We lived in New York between 1941 and 1945 in a great friendship, running museums and antiquarians together. I owe him a lot about the knowledge and appreciation of objects. I've never seen him [Breton] doing a mistake on exotic and unusual objects. When I say a mistake, I mean about its authenticity but also its quality. He [Breton] had a sense, almost of divination."

"So, André Breton, if tonight I dream I am screwing you, tomorrow morning I will paint all of our best fucking positions with the greatest wealth of detail."

"Under his [ Marc Chagall ] sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting."

"Divine Dali!"

"There is a concealment that is of a different nature. It may take various forms; it always has to do, I think, with a special concern for the majority. I remember a meeting with André Breton after I had translated an introduction of his to a book of "primitive" paintings. We spoke of publishing. "I would never publish anywhere," he said, "unless I knew that there I and my followers constituted a majority." (This attitude, certainly, stands in direct relation to the forming of groups of the "intentionally obscure.")"

"André Breton, initiator of the most extraordinary revolution (because it engages much more than art-indeed, our whole life) is, of today's French poets, the most authentic. Others—"prettier," more "pleasant," more traditional, and more cowardly, as it were-may be more popular. But who cares? The least literary of our Men of Letters will remain the richest of all. Supremely indifferent: "I am not on earth with all my heart." Supremely knowledgeable and vigilant: "I touch only the heart of things/I hold the thread." Within him, the exaltation of research, the dazzling discoveries, the smiling calm of one who knows, the assurance of one who sees. André Breton: richest and purest. Blocks of crystal piled high."

"In homage to Guillaume Apollinaire [famous French poet, art-critic, writer and defender of Cubism], who had just died and who, on several occasions, seemed to us to have followed a discipline of this kind, without however having sacrificed to it any mediocre literary means, Soupault and I baptized the new mode of pure expression which we had at our disposal and which we wished to pass on to our friends, by the name of SURREALISM. I believe that there is no point today in dwelling any further on this word and that the meaning we gave it initially has generally prevailed over its Apollinarian sense."

"Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all: SURREALISM, Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner–the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern."

"After you have settled yourself in a place as favorable as possible to the concentration of your mind upon itself, have writing materials brought to you. Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that lead to everything. Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you're writing and be tempted to reread what you have written. The first sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling is the truth that with every passing second there is a sentence unknown to our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard."

"Surrealism, such as I conceive of it, asserts our complete nonconformism clearly enough so that there can be no question of translating it, at the trial of the real world, as evidence for the defense. It could, on the contrary, only serve to justify the complete state of distraction which we hope to achieve here below. Kant's absentmindedness regarding women, Pasteur's absentmindedness about 'grapes', Curies absentmindedness with respect to vehicles, are in this regard profoundly symptomatic. This world is only very relatively in tune with thought, and incidents of this kind are only the most obvious episodes of a war in which I am proud to be participating. 'Ce monde nest que très relativement à la mesure de la pensée et les incidents de ce genre ne sont que les épisodes jusquici les plus marquants dune guerre dindépendence à laquelle je me fais gloire de participer'. Surrealism is the 'invisible ray' which will one day enable us to win out over our opponents. 'You are no longer trembling, carcass'. This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere."

"L'amour est toujours devant vous. Aimez."

"L'œil existe à l'état sauvage."

"Les valeurs oniriques l'ont définitivement emporté sur les autres et je demande à ce qu'on tienne pour un crétin celui qui se refuserait encore, par exemple, à voir un cheval galoper sur une tomate. Une tomate est aussi un ballon d'enfant, le surréalisme, je le répète, ayant supprimé le mot comme."

"La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas."

"Surrealism is only trying to rejoin the most durable traditions of mankind. Among the primitive peoples art always goes beyond what is conventionally and arbitrarily called the 'real'. The natives of the Northwest Pacific coast, the Pueblos, New Guinea, New Ireland, the Marquesas, among others, have made 'objets' [in the Collections of Max Ernst, C. Levy-Strauss, Andre Breton, Pierre Matisse, Carlbach, Segredakis] which Surrealists particularly appreciate."

"I say that the eye is not open when it is limited to the passive role of a mirror – even if the water of that mirror offers some interesting peculiarities.. ..that eye impresses me as no less dead than the eye of a slaughtered steer if it has only the capacity to reflect – what if it reflects the object in one or in many aspects, in repose or in motion, in waking or in dream? The treasure of the eye is elsewhere! Most artists are still for tuning around the hands of the clock.. ..without having the slightest concern for the spring hidden in the opaque case. The eye-spring.. ..Arshile Gorky – for me the first painter to whom the secret have been completely revealed."

"Truly the eye was.. ..made to cast a lineament, a conducting wire between the most heterogeneous things. Such a wire, of maximum ductility, should allow us to understand, in a minimum of time, the relationship which connect, without possible discharge of continuity, innumerable physical and mental structures.. ..the key (of the mental prison, ed.) lies in a free unlimited pay of analogies.. ..one can admire today a canvas signed by Gorky, 'The liver is the Cock’s Comb', which should be considered the great open door to the analogy world."

"In short it is my concern to emphasize that Gorky is, of all the surrealist artists, the only one who maintains direct contact with nature – sit down to paint before her. Furthermore, it is out of the question that he would take the expression of this nature as an end in itself – rightly he demands of her that she provide sensations that can serve as springboards for both knowledge and pleasure in fathoming certain profound states of mind.. .Here for the first time nature is treated as a cryptogram. The artist has a code by reason of his own sensitive anterior impressions, and can decode nature to reveal the very rhythm of life, in the discovery of the very rhythm of life."

"Art today can only be revolutionary, that is, it must aspire at the complete and radical reconstruction of society, even if for no other reason than to emancipate intellectual creation from the chains which obstruct it and to allow all mankind to rise to the heights that only geniuses could reach in the past."

"As we liked to do as children, extracting from the soft forest floor the light chestnut trees only a few centimeters high at the base of which the chestnut continues to shine to the sun its clods of soil from the past, the chestnut conserving all of its presence and witnessing with its presence the power of green hands, of shadow, of airy white or pink pyramids of dances.. ..and of future chestnuts which, under new dust, would be discovered by the marveled sight of other children. It is in this perspective that the work of Arp, more than any other, should be situated. He found the most vital in himself in the secrets of this germinating life where the most minimal detail is of the greatest importance, where, on the other hand, the distinction between the elements becomes meaningless, adopting a peculiar under the rock humor permanently."

"Oneiric values have definitely won out over the others, and I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like.""

"Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all."

"Pure psychic automatism, by which one seeks to express, be it verbally, in writing, or in any other manner, (is) the real working of the mind. Dictated by the unconsciousness, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and free from aesthetic or moral preoccupations."

"I was asked to make a report on the Italian situation to this special committee of the 'gas cell', which made it clear to me that I was to stick to the statistical facts (steel production etc.) and above all not to get involved with ideology. I couldn't do it."

"[T]his cancer of the mind which consists of thinking all too sadly that certain things 'are' while others, which well might be, 'are not'."

"Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand; the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep."

"So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life — real life, I mean — that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feels extremely modest: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty, in this respect he is still a new-born babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it. If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything."

"But it is true that we would not dare venture so far, it is not merely a question of distance. Threat is piled upon threat, one yields, abandons a portion of the terrain to be conquered. This imagination which knows no bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance with the laws of an arbitrary utility; it is incapable of assuming this inferior role for very long and, in the vicinity of the twentieth year, generally prefers to abandon man to his lusterless fate."

"Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality. There remains madness, 'the madness that one locks up', as it has aptly been described. That madness or another.."

"We all know, in fact, that the insane.. ..derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination, that they enjoy their madness sufficiently to endure the thought that its validity does not extend beyond themselves. And, indeed, hallucinations, illusions, etc., are not a source of trifling pleasure... These people are honest to a fault, and their 'naiveté' has no peer but my own. Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen. And note how this madness has taken shape, and endured."

"It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled."