Anouk Rugueu’s remarkable artwork is beautifully rendered, mysterious, familiar, and with meaning and symbolism all its own. The images tell us stories in an eloquent language we can only understand on an emotional level, and they present visions of a strange and troubled and beautiful world. As we take the time to read them and decipher their message, we come to realize that it is our world.

We were so grateful for the chance to ask Anouk Rugueu some questions about her work.

T.O.M.: You talk about telling small stories with your work, and your art is certainly teeming with characters and ideas and mystery. Also, because of the nature of your characters – animals and insects interacting with humans – they seem almost like they might be fables. Do you think in terms of narrative in your work? Or do you think of a moral or a lesson in them, as there is in a fable?

A.R.: In my work, inspiration is intimately linked to the support, to which I attach great importance. Until a year ago, I didn’t want to draw on “noble” sheets of paper specially created for works of art. To feel free, I needed to use upcycled surfaces as packaging, labels, book pages. 

But each medium induces a style of drawing and book pages, with their tall and narrow format and their fragile paper, are more conducive to making portraits, so I made a lot of strange portraits on book pages by playing with the words from the page and favoring books on the subject of madness. 

I don’t do the same work on the packaging at all. I see the unfold packaging as a sort of theater very suitable to the narration of a story with many characters.

I choose characters a bit like a film director so I would say that no, I’m not motivated by making a fable with a moral or a lesson but rather a story with subliminal messages in it. By message I mean what concerns me deeply: What is the meaning of this world, of our presence here, our relationship with nature and other living beings? Is everything totally separate? Or is everything separate and/but interconnected? Or is everything just an appearance behind which there is only one and unique consciousness? This last possibility really appeals to me; In moments of deep meditation, I came to understand that the trees were conscious just like me. Or rather that they were imbued with consciousness as is the whole universe. It’s hard to explain but I think that consciousness is an attribute of the universe, and we humans function as a receiver that captures and translates it. This consciousness is embedded in other forms of life too: animals, plants, water… And that brings us to your second question.  

In fact, your artwork seems to represent a mythology all its own, with its own symbols, languages, motifs – its own world (or worlds), really. Do you see aspects of mythology in your work? Do they explore subjects common to most mythologies: Stories of creation, destruction, death/decay/rebirth, natural mysteries explained, human nature and our place in the world explored. Are there gods and villains, tricksters and fools? 

My intuition that everything is connected, that the universe is only one entity that divides only in appearance and shows itself in various aspects, this is my mythology.

I believe that the things from atom to universe are identical and that everything is interconnected.

I think the universe is a field of consciousness that we humans can capture in a more refined way perhaps, but that a tree or a butterfly can capture too. That’s the beauty! 

Also, some creatures are scary and beautiful at the same time, I very often feel both frightened and fascinated by spiders, snakes or things like that.

The trees with eyes mean that nature is conscious, that everything is consciousness and that sometimes, the least conscious, it is the human being who destroys everything. 

As for the devil, I think he only haunts the human soul.

Sometimes my drawings are disturbing because my anxiety manifests in them, but often the beauty manages to take the lead (to take over).

Speaking of languages, I love the fact that you’ve created your own alphabets to express your own language. Although (or perhaps because) I don’t understand them literally, I find these passages and strange letters very moving and oddly eloquent. They raise so many questions, and understanding is just out of my reach. There’s a sense of being told something urgent I can‘t quite grasp, as in a dream. And in some images it’s as though you’re labeling the creatures of this world, but it’s all so rare and new that I can’t even understand the explanation for it. But I feel I want to! Are these letters and words entirely nonsense or do they have meaning for you? Either literal meaning or a vaguer understanding of what they’re telling us? 

Thank you for what you say about my alphabets, it’s very touching.

I love alphabets, I love writing, I wrote a lot when I was young, I wanted to become a writer like my mother’s brother! I wrote strange, slightly surrealist texts, but also more classic short novels and poems. The idea of ​​creating my own languages ​​fascinates me; it also makes it easier to fill in parts of a drawing and to give a parchment or illumination style. The alphabets don’t make sense but the trick is to make it seem like they do. They accentuate the message already given by the drawing. 
For example, if two people facing each other talk in a shared bubble surrounded by nature, we can deduce that they are having a conversation about ecology and the things that should be done to improve the world. 

What is great with drawing, compared to writing, is that you can suggest rather than affirm something. In the suggestion there is room for the viewer, it allows him to give the meaning he wants.

Similar question, I guess, about the creatures who speak in the odd languages of surprising things coming out of their mouths (or eyes): birds, snakes, fish, eyes, drops of water, arms. What are they trying to tell us? Or are they not talking to us at all? Maybe they’re just breathing, as we all must do. Or exhaling some spirit or sense of themselves or the world inside of them.

When for example I put a fish or a snake in a human face and the mouth of the fish or the snake becomes the mouth of the person, yes that interests me a lot and it’s hard to explain why. Who will speak? Who are we dealing with? A human or a fish? Is he seeing the world like a human or like a snake? Yes a fish or a snake can probably speak in its own way. The fish or the snake have a lot to say about surviving in a hostile environment. Do wild animals still have their place on this planet? They would probably ask us the question if they could speak 😉 But we don’t really know and that’s what interests me. A man who is also a fish speaks with a tree. The universe tries to speak through all its characters. A cuttlefish for example (I drew one in one of my latest drawings) is something of total beauty. Its skin functions and changes like a computer screen! The message is the beauty of the diversity that we trample on.

This idea of a world inside of animals and people is so beautifully rendered in your work. It’s a world we can see, or even read, or even travel to on some level, and the creatures carry it with them, whether as a blessing or a burden. And it’s almost as though they can breathe it into each other. And that sense of connection is beautiful and compelling but almost frightening. Can you talk about worlds inside of us and how we connect or share them?

Yes, the idea of connection is what I want to represent first. However, I am a fairly wild person who interacts very little with the world. I need to have a cocoon, first it was a 20 m2 then a 40 m2 flat in a city, the size doesn’t really matter… now I have a house with a garden so, my cocoon is bigger but it’s the same thing. From this point of withdrawal, I feel, I know that everything is connected. The certainty of being connected to the whole exists independently of living in isolation, hope this makes sense for you! 😉

My deepest self is connected to people and creatures that I will never meet or see. I think that each separate part knows and carries the whole in a way that is not yet accessible to our mental understanding.

My favorite quote is a quote from Rumi: “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.”

It’s so beautifully true that it takes my breath away! The tiny drop is still there but it rises to the level of the whole. Every time I think of this sentence, I am blown away!

You see, “the entire ocean in a drop” is what I try to figure out with the “world inside” you are speaking of (cities and factories in a bear, a forest in a fish)…

Staying with these small internal landscapes: Sometimes they’re urban or industrial, sometimes more natural – a forest or the sea. Sometimes it seems that everything we as humans create leads to destruction, to a binding of the earth and a stifling of its spirit. What is our place as humans in the natural world? 

I think that human beings do have their place in this world, their reflective consciousness is a miracle: they are conscious of being conscious (animals are only conscious). But this extraordinary capacity is also the burden that we carry: we know that we are going to die, as individuals. We know that our beloved will die. We know that everything will end badly one day or another. The human life is a story without a happy end 😉

In fact, this burden is so heavy that it creates many deviations and cracks in the human mind. Madness can be one way to escape it, evil is another way. Love, art and beauty are other ways to transcend this condition. 
BUT (there is always a but) I think that the human being is a species still in the process of evolution, an evolution that should take another few thousand years maybe to fix all the bugs !! But do we have this time? 

But in your art, the natural world is watching us. The trees have eyes. Are they watching with judgment, pity, wisdom, sadness? Or some understanding beyond our understanding?

The seeing trees look without judging but as witnesses … some trees have been there for hundreds or thousands of years!  So They have seen so much happen. They resist the winds and the rains, they are powerful watchmen, their presence is reassuring, their grandeur, their nobility are such that they are wise (many shamans consider them this way). And yes, it’s exactly what you say: an understanding beyond our understanding.

The sense of labeling things is fascinating to me. The textbooks you use as drawing paper are full of words defining human states of mind or reality, types of madness, types of art, types of illness. And you turn that completely upside down by singling out certain words to create your own poetry, and by providing such a complicated cast of characters to illustrate them. It’s like a natural history book from another planet or from a dream, but it creates the sense that it’s the familiar things – humans, the world we create, the way we see the natural world – that is strange and inexplicable. Again, almost frightening but somehow hopeful, seen from this strange angle. 

Yes, the most disturbing or bizarre drawings are the ones I make on the pages of books that talk about madness, dementia, but I don’t do many of those at the moment, I think I came this year into more peaceful creations.

But book pages are important, it’s the medium I’ve used the most for 10 years, even if my style has changed a lot. I am a former bookseller, it was my first job selling books! I also had an uncle who was a writer and my mother is a huge reader. I read a lot in my student years, now I lack time but books are still important to me.

So yes, the pages and the words in the pages: recently I made a whole series of little red ghosts, they came directly from having cut out and pasted a unique sentence from a book on the first drawing of the series: “‘The terrifying ghosts of red color” ». I love the words more than all. Written communication has always been more important to me and in my life than spoken communication. Before emails, I exchanged long letters (real letters on paper) with my friends, than internet came, it was great too to communicate through emails, MSN and messenger !

in writing, you can say many more important things than in a conversation, don’t you think?

I love the application of red in your work. It has an elemental feeling, or maybe a feeling of religious importance, or emotional intensity. Can you tell us about your choice of color palette, and in particular this gorgeous red? And can you share the story of the wonderful red ghosts or beasts? 

You have a lot of intuition, Claire. Because yes, one special day many years ago, I met the red color and it spoke to me (I also loved a fly and yet I keep killing them). At that point, I must confirm that I have never taken any drug, only practiced Zen meditation! 🙂

In earnest, red is the first color I think of when I’m not doing black/white/gray.

It is the color of signals, warnings, alerts, it is also the most beautiful and intense of all colors. In itself, red is a message to tell us to be present, to be aware in the moment, red summons us into the present moment while a green or a blue will take us into a reverie…

The ghosts, as I said just before, came directly from a sentence: maybe I should do that (pick a sentence from a book) more often?

Rugueu peut sembler un nom bizarre. J’ai adopté ce pseudo dans une première période de mes créations où mes dessins étaient plus bruts et drolatiques. J’ai hésité à abandonner ce nom mais il était un peu trop tard.. Mon premier métier était libraire. J’ai travaillé des années dans une librairie de Musée, c’était l’occasion de fusionner mes passions pour les livres et l’art.

J’aime dessiner sur des livres anciens, des emballages de récup, et faire des petits dessins qui sont autant de petites histoires..Je crois que mes dessins s’interrogent sur ce monde et son étrangeté, notre rapport à la nature, comment tout est connecté.Comment la nature survit dans la ville et dans la modernité et comment nous sommes tout cela en même temps car  tout est basé sur des mécanismes communs : s’enraciner, se développer, s’étendre, respirer, se mélanger, échanger des informations…

Rugueu (which means rough in french) can look like a weird name. I took this name in the first period of creativity, when my style was more caustic, funny and raw. I hesitated a while about the name but it was too late to change…I first worked in a museum bookshop, a great place to merge my interests in books and art.

I love to draw on vintage book pages, on upcycled unfolded cardboards and making little drawings telling tiny stories about the world. I believe that my drawings question this world and its weirdness, How nature survives in the city and modernity, and how we are all of this at the same time without really knowing it.

Anouk Rugueu’s work will be included in a group show of outsider artists, Hang-Art, at the end of October.

See more of Anouk Rugueu’s work at anoukrugueu.com and on Instagram at anoukrugueu.