Mayumi Otero and Raphael Urwiller’s prolific outpouring of work makes a very good case for living somewhere as they do, which they class as “boring.” They met as art students in Strasbourg a decade ago, and now live just outside Paris where they spend their days drawing, writing, painting, researching, publishing, collecting and, in their words, “expanding their inner universe.” Their work is a breathlessly wonderful, modern folkloric study of scenes and characters that are at once of our world and another galaxy’s altogether. Together they love solving problems, getting lost in research, coming up with ideas, experimenting with new methods of working and, most importantly, finding joy and happiness from the end result. Something we predict happens fairly regularly. "Always be on the move, intellectually and spatially,” they say. “In a rare and exceptional moment, something incredible appears in a drawing, it’s pure magic, it is precious and magical. Most of our work is looking for those moments of grace.”

The New York Times, Louis Vuitton, Dedar, The New Yorker, Wired, XXI, Forbes, Le Monde, Les Inrocks, La Vie, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Canal +.

Icinori’s exhibition ‘Seoul’ at Galerie Martel in Paris »