Trentesixquinze ([3615]) Angèle Mouteau is a French illustrator.
Her work is influenced by impressions she collected during the carnival season in Dunkerque, where she spent her childhood. She is inspired by the work of comic strip artists such as Glen Baxter, Raymond Pettibon, Honoré Daumier and Robert Crumb. Her drawing are carried out with patience and precision, using mainly ink, ballpoint pen and watercolors.
The bizarre, carnivalesque scenes of these particular drawings are a tribute both to her childhood and to the Belgian expressionist painter and print-maker James Ensor. Like Ensor, 3615 uses masks and colorful costumes to decorate the subjects of her compositions, giving them a theatrical and enigmatic allure.
Masks create an eerie, comical, and gruesome kind of beauty. They temporarily replace ordinary appearance of the carrier with the hidden, subconscious face: the “persona.” Masks do not hide or conceal; they only reveal a secret interiority. They bring to the surface the desires that animate the being, animal instincts, grotesque expressions.
3615’s portfolio is // here.
