Dear Croissant,

August is a weird month to talk about faith; Easter or Holy Week would fit better, even Halloween & Día de los muertos, why not Xmas? But for artists and freelance workers, it is the month of having faith. Summer, offices half-open—positive people—half-closed—negative people. Will they reply to that email? Will everyone who makes the final decision be in? Meanwhile, I wait and look at clouds while asking the cards and asking for loans from people I know. August: feeling guilty for working, feeling guilty for resting—in this equation, guilt is surplus to my requirements.

TRYING TO MAKE BREAD, I LEARNED TO MAKE CRÊPES

Trying to make homemade bread without an oven, I discovered how to make crêpes and pancakes. Now I am the crêpe king of the 11th arrondissement in Paris, at home and for my friends: : wheat, buckwheat, with cinnamon, with cocoa, super high-protein. What you must treasure is a good friend. A good friend push you into the empty pool with no water for you, fills those holes in your soul that you don't even dare look at, and at the same time, you fill theirs. Having faith is easier when you travel in groups of two or three at least; that is why religions exist. If you don't see water in the pool, your nervous system won't take the risk; when you see that you can push someone else in, your nervous system gets playful while thinking, "Thank goodness it's not me."

Dear Croissant,

One night in March 2012, I dreamed of a scene, then we meet. The next morning I woke up with the story in my head and obsessively started writing and drawing it. An invisible friend is a friend who doesn't exist on this physical plane, but is always there in your imagination: in childhood it’s all games; in maturity it’s all conversations. We creative types often talk about voices that guide our hand. For me, S. is a friend who tells me about her life, and together we build the illustrations. Not just the ones she appears in—ever since we met, she has been in all my projects as my muse, my character to draw.

EXPO :

“ Hilma af Klint . Paintings for the Temple (1906–1915)”

193 monumental paintings created to inhabit a spiral temple. Throughout her life, she secretly painted a series of monumental works intended for a spiral temple. She never exhibited them and maintained a public career as an artist that had nothing to do with this visionary body of work. I had the privilege and good fortune to see them in a real spiral temple—the Guggenheim in New York—back in 2018, and now in 2026, I've had the chance to experience her work again at the Grand Palais.

FLAPPERS & PHILOSOPHERS :

"Little Nemo in Slumberland" — Winsor McCay (1905) . "Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland" — Masami Hata and William Hurtz (1989) . "Slumberland" — Francis Lawrence (2022) . "Slumberland (Soundtrack from the Netflix Film)" — Pinar Toprak (2022

Dear Croissant,

A MAP IS NOT WHAT YOU SEE, IT IS A PLACE YOU IMAGINE

Maps are a mental image of a place. It is an illustrated project, but at the same time, it has a conceptual use. Literally, it is about creating a small illustrated universe where users can stroll, guide themselves, and imagine themselves as just there. The map represents the space you can’t see all at once: not only the location, the way to move inside, the direction, the point of interest, the danger points, but also its aesthetics, its values, and its offerings. For this type of project, illustration is ideal because otherwise, it would be impossible to represent so much information while keeping it useful and aesthetically pleasing. The role of illustration is to convert abstract ideas into understandable concepts.

EXPO :

“VIERNES. An imaginary town that really exists”

A photographic exhibition by Claudio Vandi on the centenary of Rodolfo Morales (1925–2025) Opening Friday, 9 May 2025. MUPO – Oaxaca

ONE-DAY CITY

Is there anything more imaginary than a city that only exists one day a week? That is what happens in street markets: people gather, trade goods, share their lives, and leave, and that place ceases to exist until the following week. The photographer Claudio Vandi understood this and visited, week after week, year after year, the markets of Oaxaca, Mexico, to tell us a story as human as it is unreal and even a bit surreal—including ghosts, not spirits, but the gazes of past painters.

FLAPPERS & PHILOSOPHERS :

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino (1972) - Dark City - Alex Proyas (1998) - Chicago - Sufjan Stevens (2005)

Dear Croissant,

A MAP IS NOT WHAT YOU SEE, IT IS A PLACE YOU IMAGINE

Maps are a mental image of a place. It is an illustrated project, but at the same time, it has a conceptual use. Literally, it is about creating a small illustrated universe where users can stroll, guide themselves, and imagine themselves as just there. The map represents the space you can’t see all at once: not only the location, the way to move inside, the direction, the point of interest, the danger points, but also its aesthetics, its values, and its offerings. For this type of project, illustration is ideal because otherwise, it would be impossible to represent so much information while keeping it useful and aesthetically pleasing. The role of illustration is to convert abstract ideas into understandable concepts.

TOP 10 LIST BEST CROISSANT GRAND PARIS 2025

"Treasure Island" . Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)

Many, many—possibly most—stories written and filmed start with a character finding a document: a book, a letter, a photo, a video, or a map, and that is the spark of the story. Usually, they are secrets: A family secret? UFO photos? Classified reports? The treasure map? Whatever it is, the document itself is the conflict in the narrative. As a great example of this "Document Starter" subgenre, we have "Treasure Island" . Robert Louis Stevenson (1883), in which the main characters go crazy chasing the treasure map and the dream of becoming rich. In the pirate narrative genre, the treasure map is everything. Let's imagine for a moment the sea—vast, immense, with no locations on its own—a map is everything.

The exhibition "Cartes imaginaires. Inventer des mondes" (Imaginary Maps: Inventing Worlds), held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF - François Mitterrand site) in Paris, explored the link between cartography and imagination.

It shows how, from the Middle Ages to contemporary pop culture, maps have not only been used to measure the real world, but also to project myths, fictions, utopias, and fantastical geographies.

Dear Croissant,

What if the goal of the path isn't to get anywhere at all, but to find yourself, to discover who you are?

« The Odyssey » (2026) by Christopher Nolan

“A WESTERN AT SEA”

THE REAL HISTORY

Four centuries passed from the time real Bronze Age warriors saw their cities fall (1200 BCE) until a poet named Homer turned them into a book (800 BCE). It is the equivalent of us writing an adventure novel today based solely on rumors and songs passed down orally about the year 1626.

PARIS PARIS PARIS

In the center of Paris (75004), there is a tower standing in the middle of a park. It is the Tour Saint-Jacques, built in the Flamboyant Gothic style (1509–1523), and it marks the beginning of the Camino de Santiago from Paris via the Via Turonensis, which passes through Tours. Legend says the church was founded by Charlemagne, earning it a UNESCO World Heritage inscription in 1998 alongside 70 other buildings in France.

Dear Croissant,

This is the aperitif for this new article series: Imaginary. With our heavy, constant use of screens as well as the use of AI (like this very article), we are being stripped of something as basic, necessary, and easy as the imagination.

EXPO: UNICORNS AT THE CLUNY MUSEUM

A museum to literally lose your head over—you can ask the kings and saints who used to hang on the walls of Notre Dame many years ago. Recently, I went to the unicorn exhibition at the Cluny Museum of Medieval Art. It’s a very old institution, dating back to the 19th century, and it already had millions of visitors when it first opened back then. I hadn't been until now…

Dear Croissant,

A while ago—not a year, but several months now (I wish much more time had passed, to be honest—laughs)—I went out on a date with a guy who asked me if mermaids exist. I didn't find it cute; he was asking in earnest, and according to what he’d told me, he’s a doctor. Oh well. I told him they did exist, and there was no second date: you start by believing in mermaids and you end up believing that relationship is real. Keep my secret—I do believe in them, in unicorns, and in dragons. Understand me, I believe in them knowing they don’t exist, but I think it’s better to believe in beautiful, magical things than to accept that the world is cold and boring.

Originally, sirens in Classical Greece were birds with the heads of women who lived on rocky islands. In art and cinema, women were depicted as a danger to men.

"Miss Mermaid" Pauline Brunner and Marion Verlé (2026)

Everyone knows that moving back into your parents' house makes you act a bit like a teenager, and Fanny doesn't tell them about her aspirations: becoming professional mermaid.