Love lies in the arms of the unknown.

To conceal is to feel. Arousal is often agitated by what is hidden when fantasy has to fill in the gaps. In the work of the French artist Regards Coupables, this simple line evokes a world of loving sensuality. With a distinctive, bold and recognisable style, Regards Coupables expresses a range of evocative love gestures. The combination of the minimal design and explicit content makes the work visually powerful and appealing. However complex erotics can be in real life, Regards Coupables reduces it to its essence: an expression of love without prohibitions.

Biography

Regards Coupables is a French artist, art director, graphic designer, and musician, born, living, and working in Paris, France. Regards Coupables mother was an art teacher, and from a young age, she became familiar with art. On the bookshelf in the family home, the young artist found comic books and graphic novels from the ‘70s and ‘80s. Eagerly reading these books, they were attracted to the powerful female characters in these vintage comic books. Female sexuality was also part of these books. A particular book that Regards Coupables cites as an inspiration : La Femme piège, by Enki Bilal, a science fiction graphic novel from 1986, where the beautiful young journalist, Jill Bioskop, overcomes struggles around love, abuse, and drugs. Other influential graphic novels are : Valentina (Guido Crepax), L’Incal (Moebius), Paulette (Wolinski), Le Déclic (Manara), and Alef Thau (Arno). These books depict universes in which strong and fatal women dominated. And it’s precisely these kinds of worlds that the artist Regards Coupables would later recreate.

Regards Coupables graduated in 2012 from Penninghen, a renowned school for art direction and interior architecture in Saint Germain, Paris. During their studies, the artists learned traditional methods like drawing and painting while training to be a graphic designer. In the present-day work of Regards Coupables, there are traces of this classical education. The figures portrayed in the work are anatomically correct, a skill from learning live drawing in school. The graphic design background can be seen throughout the method and outcome of the work. Rather than paintings, the artist treats their works as graphic images. The approach is the same as creating a logo designed in black and white to ensure balance and impact.

After graduation, the artist went to work directly for an advertising production company and began playing in a band. After three years, they had enough of the advertising world and quit that job to focus on music and to start the illustration project that would become Regards Coupables. The artist wrote down two columns of 20 words to choose a name and picked the best combination. It can be translated to «guilty looks.» However, in French, the meaning translates to looking inward.

2015 - 2019

The career of Regards Coupables can be divided into two periods. The first period, spanning from 2015 until 2019, is when Regards Coupables was dating a tattoo artist, so the tattoo flash style heavily influenced their drawing. Daggers, snakes, hearts, flowers, pin-ups, and other tropes of tattoos are recurring themes in the bold illustrations. The femme fatale became a significant subject of Regards Coupables work. Female beauty, often combined with a dark hint of death in the form of knives, is a favourite thing to draw. Bodies are featured in the form of breasts, backs, and lips. There is a hint of sensuality, but the drawings of this period are not solely sexual. In this period, Regards Coupables also created stylish and straightforward drawings of pop culture, like cats and coffee pots, UFOs and ghosts.

At this time, Regards Coupables used a variety of media output for their work. They created illustrations used as tattoo designs, designed a skateboard deck, and exhibited prints at galleries. In doing so, they were able to reach both an art audience and make connections with alternative subcultures. In 2016, the Instagram account @regards_coupables was created as a means to publish drawings.

Back then, Insta was a refreshing, image-based platform and a place for illustrators and artists. Regards Coupables set the goal of posting one drawing per day in their significant graphic black and white, tattoo-inspired style. The consistency of the posts and the growing number of followers confirmed their approach, and they continued in this direction. The daily posts caused the account to blow up in 2017, with a peak of 953 K followers. Meanwhile, Regards Coupables also played music in bands, went on international tours, met a lot of people, and introduced them to their art. They were selling Regards Coupables prints on the merch table next to the records. In doing so, the audience that came for the music discovered Regards Coupables art, too.

Regards Coupables has always done accessible merchandising, and it comes from this band’s experience. The success of Regards Coupables didn’t start through sales in a gallery but from the artist making their work accessible to a large audience. You don’t need to be an art critic to understand it or an art lover to buy it. In this way, the work of Regards Coupables is democratising access to her art.

2020 - 2024

In earlier works, body parts were featured in the drawings; in 2020, Regards Coupables started drawing couples involved in sensual acts. Thematically, the work in this period is about love and the unique bond between people. We see hands holding each other in various ways, sometimes cuffed or just the tips touching. The hand is often the first body part that connects to another body and is the instigator of all intimacy. We see hugging, kissing, squeezing, and spreading. Panties are being taken off, sniffed, and shoved aside. Fingers are being put in mouths, between legs, and pressed into arms. Different sex positions can be seen, portraits of women in ecstasy, sometimes just laying around, sometimes receiving or giving pleasure. What is remarkable is that all the female characters enjoy themselves. It’s all about her pleasure, in contrast to other erotic’s like p*rn, which is often based on male satisfaction only.

Moreover, while the illustrations show kissing, fucking, and sucking, the work is not quite p*rnographic. The images are rather suggestive, as the genitals are not depicted. This leaves gaps for the imagination and makes the images appealing to people from various genders and sexual orientations. By solely creating scenes that suggest sex, Regards Coupables started to define herself as an erotic artist.

Social media

In this second period of Regards Coupables career, social media platforms began to enforce strict regulations on sexually explicit images. Instagram reported and removed their posts for violating the platform’s rules. As an artist, Regards Coupables immediately perceived this as a form of censorship. The anonymity behind their work didn’t help with the bans, as they couldn’t have a certified account associated with a physical person. Instagram changed from a place to consume art to a place to consume someone else’s life. It became challenging for visual artists working with the theme of sensuality to express themselves.

Regards Coupables started to look for other outlets to spread their work, like the publication of monographs. In doing so, a book cannot be deleted in a click and build an audience that reaches beyond the limits of the internet. Making a book is also another way of making art accessible outside the highbrow, gatekept art world and the limitations of the internet.

Love

Regards Coupables invites viewers to embrace their sensual desires openly. It is touching on a subject that resonates with a broad audience and are a means of expression for social media users. The work is shared in private messages or through texts for flirting, heating things up, and sharing ideas - in a way, as a source of inspiration and elevation. A way to move away from the overflowing p*rnographic images on the internet that have nothing to do with expressing love for each other. The work helps people bond and makes them feel joy; it evokes excitement and offers a welcome sensual escape from society’s tight rules and regulations. And these emotions, these feelings of trust and surrender, are central motifs in her work.

In Regards Coupables’s work, there is no distinction between love and lust. According to the artist, she focuses on the feeling of love, a mystery approaching the sacred. Regards Coupables chooses to represent this feeling in its fleshy form, expressed through gazes and touches. The fact that certain intimate parts are not drawn confirms that the feeling predominates. Love lies in the arms of the unknown.

Essay by Pernilla Ellens for Baron Books 
https://www.baronbooks.co.uk/product-page/regards-coupables-the-complete-works