Dans le ciel tout va bien (In the Sky Everything is Alright) is the 2019 winner of the call for projects “Résidence auteur.trice-illustrateur.trice jeunesse” (Residence for young authors and illustrators) by La Marelle, Fotokino and Altiplano. Dans le ciel tout va bien: a pseudonym, of course, but one could also see in this meteorological statement a real plastic manifesto: the sky is indeed a recurring motif in his work, whether in the post-it drawings that made him popular, where the sky is tinged with fawn colors (we note that even here the forecasts are frequently incorrect, since the skies are more like a space for climatic outbursts), or in the project that brought him to Marseille. Aimed especially towards children, the book he is working on throughout his residency will tell the story of a family’s migration during Prehistory, when they leave their home in search of shelter for the winter, through pictures and without the use of words. In the great landscapes, which remind us how small men were then in front of nature, immense skies unfold, uniting men in space and time.
The sky thus, but more broadly the landscape is an ever-present subject in his work. It constructs the space of the page on its own, but also offers forms of narration that the viewer is free to make, or not. From these landscapes, these fragmentary views of ill-defined and somewhat deserted regions, Dans le ciel tout va bien has been designing books, most of them self-published, for many years. For this small exhibition, he has selected trials, experiments that have been part of several of these publications. A method of reorganizing sketches, but also of showing what remains on the fringes of a book project, when the final form is completed.
