Zephir

Zéphir, whose real name is Paul André, is a French comics author and illustrator, born in 1992. Trained at the prestigious École Estienne in Paris, where he graduated with a degree in illustration, he quickly developed a deeply personal graphic universe, defined by a keen sensitivity to inner states, human fragility, and the intimate struggles of his characters.

At just 21 years old, he published his debut graphic novel, Le Grand Combat (The Great Battle, Futuropolis, 2014), originally conceived as his graduation project. This founding work already questioned the place of the individual in the world and how each person confronts the trials of existence — themes that would run throughout his entire body of work. He went on to create L'Esprit rouge (The Red Spirit, Futuropolis, 2016), written by Maximilien Le Roy, revisiting playwright and poet Antonin Artaud's journey to Mexico. This project opened up a more hallucinatory visual vocabulary, in service of a simultaneously poetic and sensory narrative experience.

Over the years, Zéphir has published four graphic novels, while simultaneously developing an independent painting practice, gathered in a book of paintings that highlights the contemplative and plastic dimensions of his artistic research. His work, at the boundary of intimate storytelling and visual meditation, places him among a generation of authors from graphic arts schools who conceive of comics as a territory of both narrative and visual experimentation.

As part of the Les Gardiennes de la Mer artistic residency at Résidences Rocabella, Zéphir engages with the coastal landscape as a space of contemplation and creation, in direct resonance with the themes that run through his work: interiority, silence, and the slow endurance of life's trials. Facing the sea — at once an infinite horizon and an impenetrable force — he explores the visual forms that inner states, resistance, and human vulnerability can take.

This residency offers him a rare opportunity to bring his two practices into dialogue — graphic storytelling and painting — within an environment where light, movement, and texture become sources of inspiration in their own right. Between line and colour, between narrative and abstraction, Zéphir continues a visual meditation on what it means to hold on, and on the quiet beauty that lies within ordinary struggles.