Parisian illustrator and self-described "hallucinartist" Sandrine Boulet sets her sights on London’s urban detritus with her new show Londovisions at KK Outlet. Bin bags and tube armrests are redrawn as friendly, primary-coloured monsters in her mixed-media images of the city.
KK Outlet’s open-plan gallery-bookshop-office hybrid is displaying a handful of Parisian illustrator Sandrine Boulet’s cheeky works until 27 June. The collection is centred around her time in London, with grey snaps of the city cheerfully doodled over in bright, blocky primary colours. The flat, digitally hand-drawn quality of the sketches gives the works a playful Microsoft Paint graphic quality.
Boulet takes a look at the over-looked, making the mundane curious. From her generic photos, she creates bin bag lovers, tube armrest creatures, and a face fashioned out of one bloke’s neck wrinkles, titled Mr Face Neck. Her ebullient doodles extend beyond the displayed photos, with scribblings covering KK Outlet’s walls, ceiling, floor and front door. The gallery’s entrance sign has been modified to announce, “COME IN WE’RE NAKED."
Boulet’s aesthetic is distinctly franco-feel but the images capture a certain idiosyncratic personality of London: a British eccentricity where it seems fitting to recast an electric teakettle as a person, as in The Kettle. Boulet explains “I’m a happy frog in the fog… Deep inside me, London is a dream city (after Paris!).”
So there you have it. The French-English border is permeable after all.
Londovisions by Sandrine Boulet
KK Outlet, Hoxton Square, London
Until 22 June 2015
kkoutlet.com