by Agathe Guetat April 18, 2021

Delphine

For the Cartesians, you know well, hypersensitive people move forward in life in a desperately irrational way, and yet they move forward, on a treacherous path that only they know, full of sounds, smells, sensations, snippets of songs and fragments of sentences that announce the coming day with the promise of beautiful encounters. Ricochets and resonances between all the sensations that are offered, are the traveling companions of our lives.

“How can we show, without betraying them, the simple things drawn between twilight and the sky? By the virtue of stubborn life, in the loop of artistic time…. »

I had in mind this sentence from René Char taken from his preface to La Posterité du Soleil – sublime title! - by Camus, when I met Delphine [Cauly].

Yes, Delphine is an artist through and through. Delphine has always been drawing. As a child she drew princesses, obviously, day after day, with the same relish. She knew very early on, as if it were obvious, that her reason for being would be linked to drawing. Studious schooling, teacher parents... Who claimed that one can only become an artist through revolt and convulsions? Clichés! Delphine was born an artist, she only lives her life with gentleness and kindness, simply free and stubborn, under the guidance of her beloved mother, a true Corsican Mama who shared the astonishing beauty of the Sanguinaires Islands and Ajaccio with her babies. Our parents never envisaged us being acrobats… or entrepreneurs. This fate is not without nobility, however, material comfort and job security are not, in the beginning, the lot of artists... or entrepreneurs.

Upon leaving the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Delphine is only enriched by the encounters she was able to make there. Immense, jack-of-all-trades visual artists, such as Boltanski, her teacher, inspired her and could have tempted her to enter their protean universe at the crossroads of free figuration and conceptual art. No, definitely, at the Beaux Arts, Delphine only felt herself while drawing, tirelessly.

By the coincidences of life, in other words, thanks to her boyfriend at the time, Delphine had the chance to respond to her first order: she illustrated pretty stories for “L'Ecole des Loisirs”, a publisher for young people. Then, the major fashion magazines, all powerful at the turn of the 2000s, paid attention to Delphine... who quickly realized that the diktat of artistic directors and their star photographers left little room for designers who only liked the margins to be filled with a thin line.

So Delphine will wander a little, without ever getting lost.
A time as a saleswoman in a store - you have to feed yourself well and pay your rent! - frustration and rumination could have made her waver. But she doesn't waver, on the contrary, she leaves her store after 3 years, to play her game, without a parachute. It must be said that around 2005, an unprecedented phenomenon – the Internet and social networks – began to invade our daily lives. A fantastic inspiration for Delphine's drawings, which spontaneously found their audience. The princesses that she drew as a child have become women. She draws them with a sober and precise line, in graphite, enhanced with India ink and a few flat areas of watercolor. A true manifesto of femininity, neither glamorous nor bimbo, but full of delicacy and without makeup, that's all and that's us, right?

Then came what was supposed to happen, a solar encounter. As 2014 approaches, Aurélie and Sylvie, singers of the duo Brigitte, fall under the spell of Delphine's drawing and her world. A fertile collaboration begins. The cover of the album “À bouche que vite-tu”, designed by Delphine, enters into symbiosis with lyrics and rhythms which transport us to the stage of a casino on the Riviera before the unleashing of disco. Watch the clip, make no mistake, the two girls in lamé are not the nunuches on duty that boys in sports convertibles whistle on the Croisette. They are in control of their emotions and aware of their power of seduction, without overflowing, ever, but perhaps slightly nostalgic for a time when life was carefree - “🎼…life and sugar love songs make me always have as much effect... palalalala pa pa lalalala..." - against a backdrop of palm trees, papyrus and stuffed pink flamingos. Here, encapsulated in this clip, is Delphine's entire universe.

She gave it a name, a unique signature, which serves as a personal mythology: the summer of 1981 .

It is naturally the year of his birth, as well as that of Beyoncé, Alicia Keys, Natalie Portman and Louise Bourgoin. The stars had beautiful inspirations that year. In the process, the death penalty was abolished, thrown into the darkness of our history, after a great summer. According to our parents and the witnesses of this blessed time, vaguely melancholic, the spirits were in celebration, not in distraction, nuance! Studio 54 in New York in the wake of Andy Warhol and Bianca Jaeger, Le Palace in Paris, embodied this kind of carefree cosmopolitan hedonism. On the beaches of Pampelonne, mothers and daughters, topless, played and reenacted “The Year of the Jellyfish” while sipping a Campari soda… melanoma was not a subject of attention, nor were the upheavals that were coming. . AIDS would soon spoil the party, Chernobyl will follow, a time compensated for by the fall of the Berlin Wall... we know the rest of the story, with its crazy hopes and its trials like this Corona virus which persists. That's life ! But in this life, we must never miss the enchanted parentheses that come and go, like the Summer of 1981.

I asked Delphine to draw our next mantras and the boxes that serve as a showcase for your orders. I am moved that Delphine accepted. Of course it's about trade, but without human alchemy, it would be meaningless. So when you open the pretty box that will contain your order, you will have the impression of smelling the scent of Summer 1981. The train tail of the hippie years in Formentera (it is not for nothing that one of our blouses is called Mimsy, like Mimsy Farmer, the siren of “More”) would bring her notes of Monoï and Patchouli, the lapping of turquoise waters and the bossa nova of Chico Buarque (the Schweppes ad obviously) would come and sing:

“🎼 Try your diferante”… Yes, this girl is different and it wouldn’t just be an impression.