Agathe Toman: the artist who feels in black and white

To The M O O N And Back — Black ink courses through French artist Agathe Toman’s veins. She gives us the lowdown on her new show, featuring macabre visions and moody skate cruisers.

“I think and feel in black. I’d like the world to be black and white to be honest,” artist Agathe Toman explains.

Agathe’s striking black and white pieces have slowly been blowing up a storm, and now shes’s back for her second solo show, To The M O O N And Back, at Surfin Estate in France’s surf mecca, Hossegor.

“The title To The M O O N And Back comes from the French expression “I love you to the moon and back”, but in a less literal way”, she says. “It’s about feelings, the ones that change your life and yourself – positively or negatively. Those feelings that affect the rest of your existence, the events of the most extreme manner that occur in your life. Each of my illustrations or canvasses represent one thing that changed my life in a way, for good or for ill.”

Photo by Jeanne Baron

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Agathe first popped up on our radar with her moody skate cruisers and the new show features a variety of boards, each decked out in Agathe’s macabre black and white style. “I love the skateboard as an object in itself,” she explains. “Together with all of the environment and the lifestyle that surrounds skateboarding. Drawing on a deck is always an irregular medium, due to the veins of the wood. No two skateboards will react to ink in the same way.”

BIG CANVAS_EMPTY YOUR VEINS_FULL LOW BIG CANVAS_EMPTY YOUR VEINS_ZOOM1 BIG_MOOD2_LOW Agathe has branched out, using her signature style to create more abstract paintings on a range of mediums, from decks to huge canvases. Designing the cover art for French singer and composer Guillaume Grand’s latest album cover (above), allowed her style to evolve, with a ripped-apart/glitch effect. “I began to draw my “glitch moons” right after I finished his cover,” Agathe explains. “I’ve had an obsession with the moon for a long time, drawing them is a poetic reflection of myself, but I’ve never represented it in this way before. How I do it? It’s the same as the other illustrations I execute with the bic pen, a million strokes per minute!”