Céline Le GouailThis Very Long Wait

Walking in Céline le Gouail’s black and white landscapes makes you feel like you’re dreaming about something absolute, full of waterfalls of cum and lustful girlfriends. It’s the feeling of finding the calm in the eye of the storm and liking it. They reinvent the family portrait, undressing all of our intimate cockroaches. Céline’s creatures spread all over the mountains in your brain. They’re pro-sex activists, butch doms, dirty kids, modern families that look like the queer future you only hoped was possible. They’re all happy and completely powerful. Céline Le Gouail inspires all of her friends to fuck each other and basks in being surrounded by all of these hot, familiar figures. When we see them we want to hug them and sniff their skin, because we love them with a rare, true affection.

Céline Le Gouail’s landscapes are recreations of unsupervised childhoods, cast through working-class imagery. They engrave into them, they dig in, they put all their strength into the material. It’s a BDSM practice, pushed against time and medium. The wait, the frustration, the rules, the discipline, the multiple trials that go into making just that one image, the one that makes you shudder. In their studio in the Paris suburbs, they print their piss-splattered fanzines and churn out salacious personal ads for love-starved dikes. Their version of publishing is one ruled by guts and politics, that fights for a better collectivity, that will cancel out heteronormative dominance and patriarchal institutions once and for all. Céline wants you to come and play.

The spaces that Céline Le Gouail chooses to invest are those that you can still actually get to. They want to tear it all down, but so that they can build it again. So they work to create tools for better transmission, and spaces that help us to get the fuck out. Their engraving workshops for kids and teenagers help to kick open the doors of assigned gender, and their adult print workshops inspire groups to reactivate their common fantasies, convoking feminist icons both real and imagined. They invented and plan the D’Wolfinfest festival, a celebration of queer visibility and feminist micro-presses, DIY culture, love, and workout videos.

Céline le Gouail is a limitless explorer of extraordinary humanity. Whatever they do, it’s deep in their skin and planted directly in the heart of politics, for an overall interrogation of hierarchy and inequality. When you hear “Céline,” feel the total joy of being alive, of being yourself, of always bringing everything you have to offer.