Gwénola Carrère Extra-végétalia (Partie 1)

Thursday 23 June from 6 to 9 pm, come and meet Gwénola Carrère and discover her book Extra-végétalia at Peinture Fraîche. The artist will also exhibit some of his original plates in the window of the bookshop from 23 to 25 June.

At the edge of the universe, a little to the left of our galaxy, a few stars and a black hole rub shoulders with the small planet Vegetalia.

Its surface conditions are much the same as those on Earth: craters, volcanoes, seas and streams. It is home to a lush jungle of gigantic, perennial tropical plants that flourish with animal power. In this mystical and fertile setting, a society made up of women lives peacefully, until the day when, projected from who knows what vortex, a wounded man appears on the beach…

Gwenola Carrère, a talented visual artist, unfolds here the first part of a lush tale very freely inspired by the feminist novel Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915). With its wild and erotic style, the book is reminiscent of adventurers’ tales and early fantasy novels, and reminds us that even for seasoned explorers, the most virgin lands are those of the heart.

Biography
Gwénola Carrère was born in 1977 in Geneva, Switzerland, to French parents. As she is passionate about the European French-speaking world, she left early to Brussels to study illustration and then screen printing. Her work as an illustrator led her to produce posters and record sleeves, notably for the independent label Okraina, but also images for the Belgian, French, English and American press, as well as for magazines or collectives such as Nobrow, Taschen, the magazine Dada, XXI… In 2012, she co-directed an animated short film, La chute, as part of the Laboratoire d’images produced by Canal+, which was selected for several festivities (as they say in French-speaking Europe). She publishes children’s books, 5 to date, with publishers with names like Thierry Magnier or Albin Michel. But she also tackled comics with a first short story in 2014, La porte de l’amour, in a collective collection published by Oogachtend, but also in the book-disc ‘Elpmas’ (Moondog) revisited published by Ici d’Ailleurs, Murailles Music and Super Loto Éditions in 2018. In parallel to her work as an illustrator, she has been teaching illustration at the St-Luc art school in Brussels since 2007. Her first personal comic book, Extra-Végétalia (part 1), was published by Super Loto Éditions & Les Requins Marteaux in 2022, with the second and final part scheduled for 2023. For this, she won the ‘Belle plante’ prize at the Festival BD & Parthénogenèse in Châlons-sur-Saône in 2036.