Life, the city | Illustrator Cécile Gariépy: enlivening Montreal

Our journalist travels around Greater Montreal to talk about people, events or places that make the heart of their neighborhood beat.

The thousands of motorists who drive north on the Décarie highway every day see his mural on Habitations Bourret. His jovial and colorful characters also animate the walls of the Montreal-Trudeau airport and the green alleys of the Villeray district.

In fact, illustrations by Cécile Gariépy can be found all over the world, notably in Belize and Norway. And until October 23, you can admire his work on the twenty signage panels that dot Sainte-Catherine Street, between De Bleury and Saint-Laurent Boulevard.

The Quartier des spectacles asked the illustrator to appropriate the road sign codes with her unique style. “It’s a dream project. For me, that’s what illustrating is: playing with codes that everyone understands and which are part of our daily lives. »

In an “intelligible” glance, the role of the illustrator is to catch a person’s eye, whether by amusing them, by showing them an unexpected angle or by making them think, expose -She.

A distinctive style

Over the last few years, Cécile Gariépy has developed a visual signature of her own with her undulating and moving characters. As we walk together in front of Place des Arts, we see a festival poster where we have reproduced his style…

For the illustrator, it’s more flattering than annoying. “I drew when I was little,” she says. I didn’t think you could make a career out of it. » But as his mother, who was a graphic designer, told him, “you even need someone to design a Kleenex box”.

Cécile Gariépy has no training in visual arts. Instead, she studied communications and cinema. She participated in The Escape race around the world and worked as a television director before doing a master’s degree in cinema in Paris, where she began drawing. “I was looking for myself and I started to draw my life,” she says.

By putting her everyday drawings on Instagram, she had no idea that the LG2 agency was going to contact her for a Gastronomic Pleasures campaign. “My career changed and it became my job. »

Shortly after, the New York Times commissioned him for an “editorial” illustration. Cécile Gariépy then provided illustrations to Spotify, Aesop, and the magazine Nylonetc.

Since then, his “guys”, to use his words, have also embellished credit cards, shoes, cans of beer, stores like Décathlon, the Mont-Royal curling club, and even the City’s website. from Repentigny. “As much as I like advertising with a concrete message that must be delivered quickly, I like to balance it with more free projects. »

When Cécile Gariépy accepts that her illustrations serve brands, the collaboration stops there. “My job is drawing. I am not an influencer,” explains the woman who is represented in North America by the agency This Represents, and in France by La Suite.

Collaboration with La Pastèque

While traveling in Japan, she says she was overcome by emotion when she happened to see one of her illustrations in an Apple store – as was the case in the chain all over the world. “I could never have imagined being seen by so many people. »

Cécile Gariépy is no longer at the “can’t believe” stage of being paid for her drawings, but she still pinches herself about talking about illustration as her “job” and collaborating with an art house. edition like La Pastèque, with whom she illustrated several children’s books including Gale, Lost object And Funny sports: Olympic curiosities (with the journalist from The Press Simon Drouin).

These days, she is very busy with a major graphic novel project for pre-teens with Guillaume Corbeil. “It’s amazing to work with someone like him. It’s a game of ping-pong between him and me. I couldn’t do his job and he couldn’t do mine. Together, we do something that is bigger than us, and it is in these collaborations that my job takes on its meaning. »

Otherwise, Cécile Gariépy would like to be able to go to Oslo, where she illustrated an important campaign for the public transport service. For her, entering into people’s daily lives and even contributing to it, as she does with her mural works or her project in the Quartier des spectacles, is something very rewarding. “An image can warm the heart like a smell,” she emphasizes so well.