Petra Mrzyk and Jean-François Moriceau make love to the walls and each other while creating their cheeky, starkly stunning images. Their works have been described as “better than antidepressants,” and clever visual language makes it impossible to suppress a smile. Their work transforms the space it occupies, using subtle, innovative marks to turn gallery walls into playground slides, saucy jokes and secret portals.

According to Mrzyk & Moriceau, and contrary to what many people say, everything is black and white. Positive and negative, darkness and light: these are the oppositions Mrzyk & Moriceau negotiate to make images. The ability to distill gut feelings and visceral reactions down to the purest graphic expression is what makes some artists good, and others superb. It’s what makes Mrzyk & Moriceau unforgettable. Jean-François took some time to speak with me on behalf of this sublime duo, and things got real personal, real fast.

Kristin Farr: When you and Petra make love to the walls, what kind of lovers are you?
Mrzyk & Moriceau: It depends on the walls, but sweeter is better. I will send you some private pictures.

Do your drawings ever get so sexy that you have to take a break and make out?
You mean do I ever have an erection while I’m drawing? No, never! Neither has Petra... or she never told me!

What kind of juxtapositions attract you most?
Maybe salty/sweet food (sucré-salé).

Are there distinct things that you and Petra each contribute to the work, or are you really melded into one artist?
In the first years, things were really distinct. Petra used to draw ponies and I used to draw tits, and with time, we began to mix our drawings. The ponies became very sexy and monstrous. Now it’s hard to distinguish which one of us drew which drawing because our styles have fused and we can’t help retouching each other’s drawings.

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How did you meet and begin collaborating?
Petra and I met at school in Quimper, a cool, small art school in the west of France. First we were a couple, and then at the end of art school, we started drawing together. We didn’t really “decide.” It was just completely natural to make things together. We started with drawing because we were poor. We had no money to buy stuff to make paintings or sculptures. A pen and some paper was enough to create and we never stopped. Our collaboration also worked because we both admired the same artists: Markus Raetz, Roland Topor, Eva Hesse, Fabrice Hyber, Tony Cragg and Glen Baxter.

Does the imagery you produce come from a stream-of-consciousness approach?
We have a big garden, and very often ideas come, who knows how, while we’re gardening. You’re not very concentrated on what you’re doing and your brain starts to wander.

Do you spend all day drawing and laughing?
Almost! A good day is drawing-laughing-cooking-gardening-drawing and then drinking red wine!

What is your ideal holiday?
Personally, I don’t like holidays because I don’t need it—I prefer working. I am lucky to have the job I dreamed of as a child. For Petra, it’s different. She loves holidays!

Do you consciously try to break images down to the most basic forms?
Not really. Our first drawings were much more complicated with a lot of lines. We used to draw with a very fine pencil, but with time, our drawing style has become more and more simple. Maybe in a few years, our drawings will become hyper-minimalist and we will use just one line.

What kinds of things do you see that make you instantly react and want to draw?
Plants and cats are very inspiring, but that sounds like an answer from an old lady—which I’m not!

What is the most absurd thing you have seen this week?
It’s not the most absurd thing, but the strangest thing I saw this week was in the garden: a lizard with two tails! I imagine that a cat tried to catch him, he lost his tail, and then the tail doubled. What will happen if a cat catches his tails again?!

Four tails? Speaking of cats, how did you make the Midnight Juggernauts video? I picture you tossing cats around the studio.
Yes, exactly; it was an intense day. We used six cats and an owl to make the video. They were professional cats who used to work in advertisements and they were very friendly. We took special care with the very fat cat—we didn’t toss him too high.

I saw an image called Cleo’s Drawing on your Tumblr—do you have a child prodigy?
No, but she loves drawing. Cleo, our daughter, is five years old, and every day, she sees her parents making drawings, so naturally she wants to do the same. Her drawings are full of details, and while she’s drawing, she’s building a story.

Would you make narrative films? Do you ever want to see your characters talking?
Yes, we would, but only short narrative films. We made some storyboards about the five senses called Le Club des 5 Sens. Every sense is a character; they spend the day in the lounge, reading, smoking, drinking, collapsed on the sofa doing nothing, and occasionally, somebody comes to knock at the door and disturb them. Maybe one day you will see them on your computer.

Are there other artists working in black and white that interest you?
We love Felicien Rops. He was a Belgian artist who lived at the end of the nineteenth century. In 2006, we had the opportunity to make an exhibition at the LACMA in Los Angeles using their collection of Rops drawings. We made a lot of wall drawings playing off his works. It was a really interesting opportunity.

What do you like about the impact of black and white?
Actually, we started making black-and-white images because Petra and I couldn’t agree about which colors to use, so we eventually decided to stay in black and white; it’s faster. Also, since color can direct the sense of a drawing a lot, we like that black and white keeps the drawing as open as possible. We like to leave the drawings open to interpretation.

I appreciate how you use the space in a gallery.
We like when the layout is a bit messy and surprising. We need to think about all the space of the gallery, not only the walls, but the ground, the ceiling, the doors, even the small seams on the walls.

Do you have to sketch and practice the drawings, or does everything come out perfect the first time?
To make a good drawing, we need to make at least five drafts. It’s not easy to get the perfect line, and most of the time, in the end, it’s not quite perfect. Drawing is like a sport; you have to practice every day to improve yourself.

When we draw sketches of an idea, sometimes the idea will become something completely different. Maybe one day we will make an exhibition with all the sketches leading to a single drawing, just to show the evolution of an idea.

Are you perfectionists?
I am more and more, and Petra less and less; this is a good average.

Tell me a funny story from the exhibition installation files.
For one exhibition, we made some big wall drawings with a special black paint. At the end of the exhibition, after they repainted the walls, the drawings reappeared again and again, despite the layers of white paint. They didn’t want to disappear! So finally the gallery resealed the walls, and the drawings haven’t come back... yet.

Do you have plans to paint any big murals?
We did it one time in Nantes in France, but it was temporary. It was on a big building under construction. We did a cross-section of the building, imagining a different scene on every floor. It was funny, and we would love to do that again, especially in San Francisco!

Yes, please do! I discovered that I can see your work very well without my glasses. Did you know that it’s so ultra visible?
No! We didn’t know that. We are just nearsighted.

Are there bands you’d like to work with or plan to work with soon?
We have no definite plans for the moment. We are listening to a lot of different music and are open to proposals. As for a lot of people, Tame Impala’s last album “put us in the ass” (as we say in French). This week we’ve been listening to the first solo album of Nicolas Godin from Air. Beautiful.

I love the “Sing Sang Sung” video you did for Air. It was uncharacteristically colorful. Did you have a specific inspiration?
Thanks. We were both born in 1974, and as children, we watched a lot of cartoons like L’alinéa by Cavandoli, Les Barbapapas, and Planète Sauvage by Laloux & Topor. “Sing Sang Sung” reminds us of this period of cartoons with pastel colors. So we created this simple black ball which wanders through a strange landscape. Cleo loves watching it.

What are some music videos that moved you, and did you always want to make them?
The desire to make music videos came very early. We listen to a lot of music while we’re working, and sometimes the music fits very well with the drawings we’re working on. The format is great too. Three minutes is the right duration because it takes a lot of time to make animations. But we would love to make an animated movie which uses all the songs of an album like Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

Tintin has made some appearances in your work. What does he represent for you?
I think Tintin was a big influence on us when we were young. We read all the books many times when we were teenagers and I admired his ligne claire, which means a drawing with very simple and precise lines. A lot of artists have used the Tintin character. I especially love one called Tintin au Congo à Poil which is the volume Tintin in the Congo as revisited by Thomas Lebrun. Tintin is totally naked through the entire story! I was also a big fan of the Belgian comic André Franquin and his character Gaston Lagaffe, and his famous book Les Idées Noires (Dark Designs), and also the French comic Fred and his character Philemon.

Tell me about the new children’s book you’re making.
It’s a little story about a booger family! During the night, a big finger kidnaps some guys, and then it’s the big panic in the boogie’s village! It’s a funny story if you have children between three and seven years old... or older if you like boogies!

What else are you working on now?
We recently did a movie title sequence. Our first one! It’s called Moonwalkers, it’s directed by Antoine Bardou Jacquet. It’s about a CIA agent who tries to find Stanley Kubrick to secretly shoot a moon landing in a studio. The sequence is a cartoon full of colors in the mood of Yellow Submarine.

We also just finished a collaboration with Vans. It’s a print campaign for their 50th anniversary. It was intense and cool; intense because the timeline was tight and cool because they were completely open to our propositions.

What’s your favorite joke?
It’s not a joke but a word created by Gary Larson. The word is “anatidaephobia,” which means the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you.

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Read more in the April, 2016 issue of Juxtapoz Magazine, on sale here! And keep an eye out for the March, 2016 launch of Mrzyk & Moriceau’s illustrations, animations and unique characters for Vans.