Catherine Meurisse takes on the À la Mère de Famille Advent calendar, our 11th opus!
The cartoonist-reporter, caricaturist, illustrator and comic book author was seduced by the deliciousness and the story of our travels to cocoa plantations. Her interpretation of the Advent calendar is the perfect embodiment of her humor and her love of nature.
"À la Mère de Famille has a funny way of raising her children: she teaches them how to catch female and male cartoonists in her nets. The method is simple: Steve (co-owner of the Maison) innocently invites you to visit his shop on rue du faubourg Montmartre, and puts a basket in each of your hands. Then he plunges his into the confectionery displays, stirs up the pralines, harvests the ganaches, gathers the calissons, rakes the spreads, scrapes the caramels, rakes the orangettes, and all of this miraculously pours into your arms. Everything happens very quickly. Suddenly weighed down by a few tons of sweets, dizzy with treats, I didn't have to think long before answering: Okay, I'd love to illustrate the 2023 Advent calendar."
Mother Nature and Mother of the Family
"In addition to this spectacular magic trick, I was given a hint about another: how are cocoa beans chosen to make the Maison's chocolates? Steve and his family told me about their journeys in India (which links back to the article) and Latin America, the colors of the pods and the smells in the plantations, and that is where my idea for the calendar drawing germinated. It seemed interesting to me to show the leaves of the cocoa tree and the wildlife associated with it. To remind us that in the beginning, there is another Mother, nature, and that everything comes out of her hat first."
On the facades and roof of the calendar-house, the journey takes place as much through the countries as through the seasons: the pods and butterflies from below the equator are dressed for winter, Christmas permitting; southern mythology mixes with northern mythology. The adventure inevitably ends on the tongue, when all the chocolates will have melted there, on the evening of December 24. Good news, the trick starts again the following year!"
Advent calendar 2023 x Catherine Meurisse
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About Catherine Meurisse
Born in 1980, after studying modern literature, Catherine Meurisse studied at the Estienne School of Graphic Arts and then at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
In 2001, because she won first prize in a school press drawing competition, the Charlie Hebdo team welcomed her. The newspaper Les Echos welcomed her at the same time, allowing the young cartoonist to practice the splits. The cartoon virus was contracted. At the dawn of her 25th year, Charlie Hebdo hired her for good; she would work there for twelve years as a cartoonist-reporter and caricaturist. By her side were the fiercest press cartoonists: Cabu, Wolinski, Charb, Luz, Riss, Tignous, Honoré, Jul, Willem. Armed with the lessons of these insolent ones, she imposed her spontaneous style in many newspapers (Le Monde, Libération, Les Échos, L’Obs, Télérama, Causette...) and simultaneously pursued a career as an illustrator for young people, in magazines (Okapi, Astrapi...) as well as in publishing (Bayard, Gallimard jeunesse, Nathan...). The professions of caricaturist and illustrator were quickly joined by that of comic book author.
Photo credit ©Nicolas Trouillard
In the albums she creates, most often blending art and literature, a serious attitude has no place. After Mes hommes de lettres, Le Pont des arts and Moderne Olympia, which invited famous painters and writers to step down from their pedestals and join the dance of the muses and museums, after Savoir-vivre ou mourir, the hilarious account of Nadine de Rothschild's integration course at the Academy of Good Manners, after Drôles de femmes, a series of portraits of actresses and artists who made humor their territory (Florence Cestac, Anémone, Yolande Moreau, Dominique Lavanant... with Julie Birmant on the script), she published in 2016 La Légèreté, the moving account of her return to life, drawing, and memory, after the attack on Charlie Hebdo from which she escaped. The driving force of this book, the quest for beauty, invites her to relearn how to draw and write. This album marks the end of her career as a caricaturist. She is permanently leaving the Charlie reaction, deciding to move away from the urgency of current events to devote herself to the long time of comic books, to rediscover the time and space of reverie. Humor is essential to her reconstruction. After the burlesque Scènes de la vie hormonale, she published Les Grands Espaces, an evocation of her childhood in the countryside where savory memories mix with a political awareness of the landscape damaged by intensive agriculture. In her comic books, nature and culture are permeable; trees are a vigorous tribe from which we have much to learn, according to Marcel Proust.
In 2019, Delacroix was published, an illustrated adaptation of the memoirs of Alexandre Dumas, a great friend of the painter Eugène Delacroix. This album put her on the path to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Elected on January 15, 2020, in the Painting section, she brought comic books into the Institut de France for the first time. Now an Immortal but keeping her feet on the ground, she published in 2021 La Jeune femme et la Mer, an initiatory account that questions our ability to enter into resonance with nature. This album was inspired by her residency at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto. Last year, she signed the illustrations of La Fontaine's Fables (Ron-Grand Palais editions), as well as Humaine, trop humaine (Dargaud), a comic book that humorously shakes up the codes of philosophical thought.
A major retrospective exhibition, Catherine Meurisse, la vie en dessin, was recently dedicated to her at the Bibliothèque publique d’information du Centre Beaubourg, as well as at the Cartoonmuseum in Basel, then at the Musée Ungerer – Centre international de l’illustration in Strasbourg. She is represented by the Barbier gallery in Paris and the Philippe Labaune gallery in New York. An Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters, she has not yet taken the time to get her medal, too busy drawing.
