In the third edition of our exclusive series called “ELLES” (plural of « she » in  french) artist Pauline Gallot met and photographed illustrator Agathe Toman, a young french illustrator, painter and visual artist.

“This series is about some inspiring girls who crossed my way. They are artist, travelers, self-contractor. But most of all they are young, they are free and today´s generation. And I always shot in special environments that give a poetical vision to the sets.”

Agathe, Black and White fighter.

I met Agathe at the end of the summer in her little studio, her lair.

She told me to come in, offered me a grenadine, made herself pasta and then we started talking.
I had heard about her a few months before, she had already heard of me.

We exchanged some words and a beer at a party, it was a little different, she was less shy, less
“naked”, more drunk too.

At home, everyone knows everyone, and everyone hears about everyone.

I had discovered Agathe’s work a year earlier, at the beginning of winter, in a house remodeled into
a gallery for artists and various exhibitions. In this little French corner of surf paradise or, as we like
to call it “Landifornia”. Life is simple there, waves, sand, forest as far as your eyes can see, people in
summer, less in winter. People have come from here and there, artists, surfers, skaters, tourists,
locals. All with the same common point of falling in love for the ocean and what it can bring. All
these people that over time have ended up staying and blended into the landscape.

Agathe is one of them. She grew up in Paris and came to settle here in the Southwest of France
where she ended up staying. The surf industry is aware of her talent and repays her well in return.
Her work represents her well, crude and rough but also filled with a poetry and an undeniable
sweetness. Fighter armed only of black and white pens and brushes, she fights to uphold her art and
express her feelings through it. Lost planets, craters, death, love, the ocean. A universe half between
earth and sky, half between the dead and living. Behind her dressed black costume is a sensitive and
assertive young woman.

I liked shooting her portrait, I liked combining our two universes for an afternoon, she laid down her
weapons a few minutes and made me glimpse some of her most beautiful smiles.

I left happy and enriched by this mutual meeting and even more certain of a thing thanks to it, the
battles of the heart always win. Agathe will remain the same, fighting for what she loves and
defending it. Always in color, but I guess, mainly in black and white.