Marion Fayol, illustrator. “My father died in my book before he died in life”

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of his house, Éditions Magnani, and while he had ten books to his name, Marion Fayol published: Lost funds, with art historian Tony Kom. Or a book of interviews that illuminates the ordinary practice of the illustrator and cartoonist with wit, sensitivity and imagination. from Tenderness of stonesabout father’s cancer, j The bare house, in which three tormented beings live in a house destined for destruction, the artist has given life to a universe populated by naked silhouettes, in a setting no less similar to a theater production, and the sets of Ardesh, where she grew up. . Whether it’s a couple Suspended loves (Special Jury Prize at the Angoulême Festival) or parenthood The little ones, the mundane never ceases to lean toward the existential in his work, a favorite object of the Surrealists, through images of extraordinary poetry fueled by puns and randomness. Meeting.

In the video: Madame Figaro’s Literary Factory

From start to finish

Miss Figaro. – Can we say that painting allows us to question the world and its riddles with which death is connected? Tenderness of stonesand, on the contrary, with motherhood The little ones ?
Marion Fayol. – I start with the personal, allowing myself to go through events, thoughts, ideas, turn them into images and words, extract material from them that transcends my experience, so that I can share emotions and questions. at the beginning Tenderness of stones, there was a desire to tell the past – my father’s condition had stabilized – and to tell about illness, hospital and disability, but without showing them realistically, with the only moving power of images. Then my father repeated himself, and instead of talking about the past, the book began to deal with the present. He died in the book before he died in life. We are, therefore, outside of testimony and the ability of fiction to construct a parallel life… As I progressed through the book, I showed it to my mother and caregivers and talked about the dialogue, the drawings allowed to speak. about what we didn’t talk about. They relied on them to talk about situations they couldn’t describe…

And for The little ones?
When I had a child, I decided to devote a year to his care, but images appeared that made up a photo album of my feelings, my doubts, traces of these great shocks. The little ones represents a mother’s point of view, reexamining the fact that I was a child, the daughter of my parents. It also goes beyond the autobiography: I had a son, but the book depicts girls and boys… Sometimes the drawings were a step back, sometimes they helped me to go further in my thoughts. The materialization of things on the page allows us to understand them, to look at them, to hear them.

I quickly outgrew the children’s stories where the good guy is rewarded and the bad guy is punished.

Marion Fayol

Does coming from a family where no one talks play a role in your work?
When speech is lacking, either we reproduce this pattern or we find other solutions… My father was a complex person, he had problems with alcohol. He wasn’t “lovable” but I loved him, he was my father. I quickly got over the children’s stories where the good guy is rewarded and the bad guy is punished because it didn’t match what I was going through. In The bare house, the characters are not good, and it is accepted as a way of being in the world that the latter is painful. My father was self-destructive and by society’s standards he wasted his life. I wanted to debunk this idea. Wasn’t his existence just as valid as the other’s? ? Who knows if being an alcoholic wasn’t also a way to find balance, even if society doesn’t appreciate this behavior. ? I feel the need to tear down all the too ordinary thoughts and try to weave something different with the threads…

Collages

Therefore, the desire to break taboos is a driving force?
For me, it’s important to enter a book as if into an empty space, to break free from norms and received ideas to bring out more subtlety and subtlety. Very often I start with a contradiction that we hear in the headlines. Tenderness of stones, the bare house while the house is getting dressed Suspended loves while we don’t freeze love The little ones, is attached to the image of a giant child hugging its small parents, to think about who are the little ones and who are the big ones. Is there a connection between the moral and the immoral, the tender and the cruel?  ? I like to combine contradictory elements, establish unexpected connections, free associations of forms and ideas, take expressions literally, and also find images in words. As if there were no chances. placement of the heroes of The bare house What’s more is a random collage put together in the same house…

In fact, I manipulate my characters like my son’s figurines.

Marion Fayol

Are your characters really characters?  ?
These are ideas, views. In The bare house, you can be all three characters at once, at different times in your life, or even throughout your day. They present three ways of responding to the problem. These are people born too naked, without a layer of social veneer. The author stays in his shell house. The rider compensated by walling off, cutting off their senses until they could no longer reach each other. The rejected lover is always between the two, coming and going between the inside and the outside, even if it means that he suffers and comes back weakened… This is a question at the basis of the artist’s practice: at what point is it necessary? one accepts to step out of one’s comfort, to encounter the joys as well as the pains of the world? In fact, I manipulate my characters like my son’s figurines. When he plays dad, mom, and baby, he does all the voices, and it’s a way to integrate his new knowledge, but also his boundaries. He projects himself equally into all three. Performing these characters is a way to play life, to observe it from different perspectives.

You say you make lists, use your dreams to create your illustrations… Is it the same with your albums??
Yes, because they are illustrations that I put into action. I like to touch, like in improvisational theater. I let things emerge to capture them rather than controlling the script. If I spend an afternoon with my son making heads, looking around us – well, we’ll make an umbrella head, a car head… – it’ll give a whole range of ideas and drawings. I can make lists of words or follow a theme a woman is on fire; he lights a man-candle; if it melts, it becomes a puddle; a puddle where he could sink, or even drown… And a whole love vocabulary comes into play. In Man in pieces, I envision a blended family with half-half children, because that’s what you hear “half-brother” or “half-sister.” Recently, my son overheard a girlfriend telling me she was going to call me back because she was “under the water”. He imagined the phone in the pool, and I explained the meaning of the phrase to him while thinking about the richness of his perspective, which came from a still-formed relationship with language. We’re back on topic small He educates me as much as I educate him.