Olow x Florian Gallou

For Blend Energy, our SS26 collection, Florian Gallou is one of the artists setting the tone. His birds, butterflies, and dream coffee makers inhabit the season's pieces. So when he stopped by the store to create a piece on our window display, we took the opportunity to ask him a few questions.

No classic interview. We opted for a Prévert-style inventory, lists rather than big questions. Because it's often in the accumulation of small things that a universe tells its best story.

PRÉVERT-STYLE INVENTORY

Damien: To start, I wanted to give you an inventory-style questionnaire. Because looking at your work, it's often mosaics of everyday objects. There's already a list effect, and through accumulation, you tell a story in which everyone can project their own.

Florian: I like that everyone has at least one element they can relate to. When you have a list of elements, not everyone will be sensitive to all of them. But everyone can find at least one thing that makes them feel alive, or think of something else, a memory.

And that allows you to have very different compositions each time?

F: Exactly, and to be able to integrate my universe too. It's quite difficult, especially with commissions. When you're asked to illustrate a very specific theme, if I can illustrate it with ten elements and I make twenty, I can at least include five of my own. The five that will be a bit more off-the-wall.

That allows you to maintain a form of creative freedom within the commission.

F: Yes. With Olow, I think it worked like that too. Some pieces are closer to the theme, and others are more from my universe, my interpretation. And the fact that everything coexists together makes it less utilitarian.

The list of what's lying on your studio table.

F: A coffee cup. A plant, always. A cutter. A pencil. A poster. Often a small object, a ceramic, something I can "zone out" on or manipulate. My mind goes in all directions, so I like to have little things I can visually attach to. I have an egg cup on my desk, it's a character's head, and instead of a brain, there's a hollow for an egg. It's always there. It's one of the things that inspires me.

There are photos too, personal stuff, with friends, family. It's as if I have my whole little universe around me: the things I love, the people I love.

D: It's funny, because it really matches your work. There's a form of contemplation. You draw small details, you can feel that you spend time observing, letting your gaze wander.

The list of things you draw without realizing it.

F: I really like drawing symmetrical things. The shape directly finds its opposite, which gives immediate balance, the same mass on both sides. The most classic: birds, butterflies, apples. Those are the three things I draw all the time.

Then, I like frontal, almost robotic characters. Two arms, two legs, no perspective, everything is flat. I like this flat aspect, breaking free from the codes of depth and redoing everything in flat masses.

So you offer another perspective, another point of view.

F: A little bit, yeah. And I think it's cool to draw something quite basic fifty times. You take a bird, which has been drawn hundreds of thousands of times, and you always find a way to do it differently. Turning the wings in all directions, the beak, the tail, reviewing the proportions. It's a good exercise, even creatively, when you're stuck on a shape: redraw, redraw, redraw. Right now I'm in a big butterfly phase.

The list of what's in your images that we don't see at first glance.

F: It's not necessarily a hidden detail, it's a way of drawing. When elements overlap, touch, or there's a gap between them, I try to make one shape draw another. When an angle serves two shapes at the same time and allows both to be understood, I think that's super cool.

I think it refers to Gestalt laws*. There are well-known examples: two black shapes on a white background, some will see a third shape in the white, others will only see the two black shapes. In reality, you've only drawn one thing, but three can be seen.

Sometimes I try to have that in my drawings. One shape crosses another, and that draws a third. It allows me to create different planes, different colors. And it creates accidents, things you hadn't seen but which turn out to be interesting. By cutting out planes, by merging overlapping shapes, I remove the constraints of perspective. It creates cool little accidents.

The list of what you brought back from Argentina (Florian was born in Buenos Aires).

F: I think it's more the overall South American culture that I find inspiring. I lived there for four or five years, so it's not a strong heritage. I've spent more time in France. What we brought back from there are my first childhood memories: a color, a smell, a material, and books.

When I was a kid, we didn't have all the internet and social media craze. Inspiration came from printed materials. There are books that really marked me, including one by Jorge Enciso: Design Motifs of Ancient Mexico. ****He had cataloged all the symbols of pre-Columbian cultures. All scans, all in black and white. And precisely, there are lots of birds, apples, little characters. When I was little, I practiced redrawing them, dealing with patterns, I did that at 7-8 years old.

These are books I still have in my library today. Sometimes I look at them again. It's one of the rare things I really had in Argentina and still have.

The list of colors you never mix.

F: In my work I don't use green that leans towards yellow. And I don't use purple, mauve, colors that lean towards purple.

There are shades I really like to reuse. Brown and blue together, I like that. Pink and yellow. There are associations I like to keep, especially when I work with grain. I have some silly rules, but it feels good to have them. For example, when I do grain on blue, it will always be brown. On yellow, always pink.

Are these rules you've written down?

F: No, it just came about. And now I try to maintain that rigor. Then, for client projects, I'll be asked for this or that shade, and then I comply with the request.

The list of the last three good meals that come to mind.

F: Tartines. "Gourmet" tartines: you put your favorite products on good bread and that's it. Simple things, lots of olive oil, good tomatoes. Apples, and lots of sardines, like four, five times a week. Yum!

Does what you eat influence your work?

F: I confess to a little passion for canned goods, and coffee too. I often draw beautiful coffee makers, even though at home I might drink old, frankly terrible coffee. It's the dream coffee maker, the iconographic thing that works well.

The list of things that don't belong together and that you put side by side anyway.

F: There are logics of coherence, of proximity. But sometimes I try to free myself from that, telling myself that we don't have to justify everything all the time. As long as we get the idea, it works. An apple with a worm in it doesn't make it any less attractive.

If I'm inspired by something, even if it's a bit unrelated and it works, I go for it. Not long ago, I had to draw a vaccine. I made a character with big ears, and his head was a syringe. As soon as you grasp that it's a syringe, who cares if he has ears: it worked. I try to be more letting go about that over the years.

The other day, I had to draw a birthday cake. Instead of making straight, kind of nice candles, I made a fuse, like the kind you'd find on a package of explosives. I like to play with those codes, mixing things without falling into something disturbing, but so that it questions a bit, that there's a double meaning.

The list of what you look at when you're not drawing.

F: I spend a lot of time outside, so I look at trees and the sky a lot.

Trees, the sky. Less people?

F: No, I'm not really into crowds, that's not my thing. And I have a lot of trouble reading, so I look at very few printed works, even comics. Though there's probably a lot of interesting stuff in there.

The list of things you would never be able to draw. And this question, deep down: when you're an illustrator, can you draw everything?

F: Oh no, not at all. Not long ago, I was asked to draw the seabed, and I found what I did terrible. Really. I'm not very into fish, the aquatic world. Even though there are lots of cool things to draw there.

And over time, I've removed details. I don't like drawing eyes, noses. I find that it gives too much identity to the drawing all at once, and people tend to categorize others' styles based on how they draw that. Now I try to simplify as much as possible, so that it's more the attitude and color that give the character's personality. Here, there are no eyes, I find it more contemplative.

The list of pieces you would keep from what you did for Olow.

F: I'd say the super colorful Aloha Life multicolored short-sleeved shirt. It's one of my favorite pieces from what we've done. I love the idea that it's everywhere. Originally, I had drawn a rather closed format, I had somewhat boxed myself in. The fact that the Olow team reworked it in their own way made me rediscover it when I saw the finished product. I got that little dopamine hit of the finished thing.

Then, the ecru Life t-shirt, it was my first monochrome drawing. Seeing it printed gave me confidence in that direction.

3:00 PM. The store opens. We put away the microphone.

Interview by Damien Gillet / Photos: Nina Ducleux

*Gestalt Laws: Gestalt psychology, Gestalt theory is a psychological and philosophical theory proposed at the beginning of the 20th century according to which the processes of perception and mental representation treat phenomena as global forms rather than as the addition or juxtaposition of simple elements.

Photographs: Nina Ducleux