From illustration to work on words, Quebecer Julie Doucet, grand prize winner of the Angoulême French comics festival in 2022, is at the heart of a major exhibition presented at the Tomi Ungerer Museum in Strasbourg, in the east of France.
“I’ve been doing lots of things for 20 years, but I had success in comics, I had this label, so I had a lot of difficulty showing anything else,” explains the artist, aged 58 years old. “There is a room completely dedicated to my writing work, it’s a first, I’m so happy to be able to show it.”
Called “Julie Doucet — A Retrospection” and inaugurated as part of the “Rencontres de l’illustration 2024”, the exhibition retraces the creative journey of this influential author who multiplied her practices, from drawing to engraving, including collage, video and poetry.
She begins by presenting the self-published fanzine that made her known in the early 1990s, “Dirty Plotte”.
At the time, Julie Doucet had just abandoned her visual arts studies and freely delivered personal and fanciful stories in which she portrayed herself, evoking her dreams and nightmares, masturbation and menstruation. , already with this keen attention to detail in his black and white drawings.
“I was really doing it for myself at the time, I had no hope of being published. I printed this fanzine at the beginning in 50 copies, I didn’t imagine it would be particularly read,” recalls the artist, who finds it “ironic and funny” to see these drawings exhibited.
“I just thought my friends would laugh, but that’s all. I didn’t think much about what I put on the page, I didn’t really have any censorship,” she explains.
Success was rapid and the fanzine, sent individually by post, attracted the attention of publishers, who published “My New York Diaries” in 1999, an account of her New York years, when she drew for newspapers like the Village Voice.
“I am a satellite”
But at the beginning of the 2000s, after more than a decade of relentless drawing, Julie Doucet gradually withdrew from the world of comics.
“If we talk about comics, it’s an environment where there are a lot of men. And then, in the early 1990s, there was a huge anti-feminist “backlash”. Being in a male environment was quite unusual, complicated… horrible,” she confides.
“It’s evolved, but it’s not perfect. It’s still largely a men’s environment and I have a moderate desire to be in a men’s environment. I am a satellite of this environment.”
Subsequently, she founded the “Lent Movement” and devoted herself more to working on words. In her autobiography, “J comme je”, she recounts the first 15 years of her life through collages of texts cut from newspapers and magazines, then plays with words, sonically, in her series of poems “Je I’m a K.”
Still using collages, she works on the graphic aspect of texts, with micropublications like “Un deux trois je n’est plus là”.
“I have always remained in the word and the image. I tried to work with just the word, to write a novel by typing on a typewriter, but it was horrible, I really need to have a graphic aspect, an image, in a way or another,” explains the author.
Recently, she has returned to drawing through graphic novels, including “Suicide total”, published in 2023 by the Association, in the form of a leporello: a notebook made up of a long strip of paper of a single holding, folded like an accordion, which allows no error or revision.
The exhibition is one of the events included in the program of “Strasbourg, world book capital”, a label awarded by UNESCO.