On the occasion of the publication of Pépites, we asked Idir and Laura to share some of their inspirations, leitmotifs, and creative process.

IDIR DAVAINE 

Born in 1990, Idir Davaine lives and works in Paris. A visual artist, he focuses on abstract landscapes, composing bold fields of color and covering his canvases with suggestive, fluid forms. A graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2017, he relies on photography as an essential tool: capturing moments from his everyday environment, which he later reinterprets in acrylic painting.
By exploring line, form, and color, Idir deconstructs and rearranges elements of mountains, forests, and natural landscapes, creating abstract, dynamic, and vibrantly colored scenes. In constant artistic exploration, he continually expands his visual universe through nature and his observation of reality. This research led him to a residency at the Chapelle Saint Antoine in Greece, where he pursued his practice in a setting conducive to reflection and creation.

His first solo exhibition took place in June 2021 in Paris at Galerie Ketabi Bourdet. Since then, his work has been regularly shown there and at contemporary art fairs in France and internationally, such as Art Genève in 2024. In 2019, a selection of his works entered the collections of the Centre National d’Arts Plastiques.

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How do your paintings come into being? What initially inspires these large formats, here reproduced and miniaturized through risograph printing and the book form?

Before painting, there is a search for small territories - remote areas, enclosed within forests, fragments of marshland, crevices, like small kingdoms. I photograph them, take notes. I retain only the most striking impressions: the light, the temperature, the movement of the rock, a strange shadow, the wind carrying debris, the permanence of the sun. These spaces are less viewpoints than sets of tensions: lines that rise, collapse, fold back on themselves. To these are added signs and symbols, as remnants of more distant inner narratives. All of this material forms the starting point of the paintings. Then comes the time of the work itself, of the image that emerges and brings its own demands. These paintings attempt to hold a fine line between observation and interpretation, figuration and abstraction - as complementary modes of representation.

I have a very old memory. As a child, the patches of land formed by highway interchanges seemed to me the most desirable places to build my house. These enclosed, alcove-like spaces are my small kingdoms, whose surface can be taken in with a simple turn of the head. I have kept a taste for these insular refuges, which I still seek in marshes, crevices, abandoned roadside places that no path reaches. My paintings begin in these enclaves.

LAURA VAZQUEZ

A poet and novelist, Laura Vazquez received the Prix de la Vocation in 2014 for her collection La Main de la main, published by Cheyne. Her first novel La Semaine perpétuelle received a special mention from the Prix Wepler. In 2023, she was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la poésie for her body of work. Les Forces, her second novel published in 2025, notably received the Prix Décembre and the Prix des Inrockuptibles. She also writes for the stage, and her texts have been performed by Hubert Colas (Zéro) and Philippe Quesne (Le Jardin des délices, Le Paradoxe de John).

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Idir told us he often writes before creating images. Do you draw from images before putting things into words?

Not really. I rarely draw from images before I begin. What comes first is a form, a structure, a rhythm, something precise in the language. Images may appear, but they come afterward. They emerge from the work of the sentence. What interests me is that the form itself thinks, that the structure carries its own discourse. And then, sometimes, I make small diagrams.

Basse réalité d’un petit volume and Haute réalité d’un petit volume are the titles of the two poems you wrote in Pépites. What is a “petit volume”?

The word volume, originally, refers to something that turns, that coils. A volume is not just a size - it is a movement, a coiled matter, a form that contains something. A petit volume can be a word, an image, something very small. This small volume can hold an immense opening, a fragment of reality. It can unfold into a very wide meaning, an expansion that goes far beyond human scale. It is this passage that interests me, between a tiny form and what it opens up.

Between your words and Idir’s paintings, there seems to be a sensitive boundary, a rhythm, a particular gesture. Do you see bridges or echoes between your practices?

Yes, there is a connection in the gesture - in working a material, painting for him, language for me, with total attention. And also, for both of us, there is no illustration, no explanation, but rather elements (colors, lines) connected to one another that allow something to emerge.