Team

Alexandra Roussopoulos was born in 1969 in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris. In addition to being a recognized artist, she has organised and developed several exhibitions including: « L'Eau et les Rêves » at the Kamchatka gallery in 2007, « Mauvais Genre » in 2009 in collaboration with Isabel Duperray at the Petit Maroc gallery in St-Nazaire, and « Young Memories » in 2015-2016, a cycle of nine exhibitions, at the Galerie épisodique in Paris. She regularly participates in workshops in France and abroad, notably at the Haute École des arts du Rhin in Mulhouse, the École supérieure des beaux-arts in Le Mans, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and the China National Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. She also co-wrote the film Delphine et Carole, insoumuses alongside Callisto Mc Nulty and Géronimo Roussopoulos, directed in 2019 (Grand Prix de Genève, selected at the Berlinale Forum 2019, SFCC Prix Télévision for the best documentary, Prix du Groupement National des Cinémas de Recherche, Prix du public FIFF, Étoile de la Scam 2019).

A writer, illustrator, editor, curator and film director, Frédéric Pajak has also been the director of various newspapers and magazines, including L’Imbécile de Paris, 9 semaines avant l’élection and the latest, published in 2021, L’Amour. He is the author of some thirty books, some of which have been translated into several languages, heralding a new form of drawn narration in which writing and drawing constitute two narratives in their own right. In 2014, the third volume of his Manifeste incertain was awarded the Prix Médicis de l’Essai and, the following year, the Prix Suisse de la Littérature. In 2019, the seventh volume won the Prix Goncourt for biographies. In 2021, he was awarded the Grand Prix Suisse de la Littérature for his life's work. In 2002, he co-founded the publishing house Les Cahiers Dessinés, dedicated to the art of drawing in all its forms, with Vera Michalski. He has curated exhibitions in France and Switzerland and has directed three feature films, one of which is about cartoonist Mix & Remix (2022).

Pavel Schmidt is a painter, draughtsman, sculptor and performer. In addition to his artistic practice, he is involved in the compilation of comprehensive annotated catalogues, the latest of which is Franz Kafka, les Dessins, edited by Andreas Kilcher (Les Cahiers Dessinés, 2021). He has organised several exhibitions including “A Homage to the Marquis de Sade” in Munich in 1989, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, “Vendredi Treize, Daniel Soerri et Paris” in 1997 at the Swiss Cultural Centre in Paris, “Kafka Unwritten” in 2010 at the University of New York and the group exhibition “Grand Trouble” in 2017 at the Halle Saint Pierre in Paris.

Éric Cantona was born in 1966 in Marseille. In addition to being the legendary ‘The King’, champion of Manchester United Football Club, the man who retired from sport at the age of 30, at the peak of his career, to devote himself to acting from 1995 onwards, is also a fervent amateur painter, a passion inherited from his father. A painter and avid collector himself, in 2017 he published 90 annotated drawings with deliberately naive lines with Flammarion, which, in his own words, reflect what he sees, what he hears and what amuses him. "Art plays a very important role in my life. Since childhood, it has been my backbone, a vital need that I nourish by painting myself and surrounding myself with the works of others: I spent the first money I ever earned on paintings by Provençal artists such as Pierre Ambrogiani, Antoine Ferrari and Auguste Chabaud. I now have a large collection, including many contemporary artists, and I dream of being able to exhibit it one day, because art is meant to be shared. As for drawing, I am a great admirer of both the technique involved and the emancipation of this technique: I really like artists with a spontaneous style, whose impulsiveness is reminiscent of the artists of the Cobra movement. And also the creators of art brut. I have always been fascinated by the world of psychiatry — my father was a psychiatric nurse. The day I discovered the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne was a very big day: this discovery blew me away. Organising a drawing festival in a city like Arles is a no-brainer. For me, Arles is first and foremost Van Gogh: my father, who also painted, had a large collection of Impressionist painters, and his favourite was Van Gogh. Arles is also home to the Feria and the Rencontres de la Photographie, and now the Festival du Dessin — a sublime city where there is so much going on culturally, a city made for promoting art and culture. I am very proud to be the honorary president of this fourth edition, and I even wonder why I wasn't asked to be from the very beginning!"

Sponsoring & contests

President of the Libella publishing group, Vera Michalski is the director of some ten publishing houses in France, Switzerland and Poland. She also founded the Jan Michalski Foundation in Montricher, Switzerland: a vast building complex dedicated to writing and visual art that provides an ideal setting for many kinds of encounters and forms of dialogue between the arts. In 2016, she helped found Un Week-end à l’Est in Paris 6th arrondissement, an annual festival that showcases a Central or Eastern European city through its writers, thinkers, artists, filmmakers, dramatists, dancers and photographers. Since 2020, she has been a member of the board of trustees of the Le Livre Sur Les Quais literary festival, which she helped to create in Morges, Switzerland, in 2010. She is also a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador.