The French designer Leslie David is one of the most interesting image-makers working today. Through color, pattern and texture she creates work that plays with preconceptions and brings a big, happy dose of personality to every brief she takes on. So whether she’s creating illustrated album artwork for Metronomy, or painted-photo posters for a French music festival, bespoke typography for Chanel or textiles for Kitsuné, Leslie’s stylistic eye and technical brilliance make for surefire joy.
Her Liquid series of prints grew out of a commission she did for Lancôme but these experiments came about almost by accident. She likes the fact that viewers will interpret these random shapes and colors in all sorts of individual ways. In this way they become like a Rorschach test, the random ink blots used by psychiatrists to get an insight into the way their patients’ minds.
“You can see what you want to see in these images,” she says. “To me they are very sensual, almost sexual; I see lips, tongues, drool, mucus, scum and body parts lost in an psychedelic landscape.”
That’s Leslie’s interpretation, but I also asked my WeTransfer colleagues what they saw in these images. The responses were remarkably eclectic and, in some cases, enjoyably revealing.
People saw drag queens and colourful mineral rocks, noses and belly buttons, New York disco and sun-dappled seas, oysters and marbles, glitter and oil and tropical fish. One person felt the images were like an LSD trip made visible, for another they suggested a “posh nail varnish tutorial.” All of which, in its glorious freewheeling diversity, confirms what we said at the start – that Leslie David is one of the most interesting image-makers working today.
