Animals
Bastien Contraire

A book about animals? Yes! But also about colours, shapes, and abstraction!

The explicit title of this book is slightly misleading: you won’t find any images of animals here! The angle chosen by Bastien Contraire is colours and words rather than features. Each page displays a circle of colour and, under it, the name of the animal related to that colour: “chick” under the yellow circle, “fox” under the orange circle, “frog” under the green circle, etc. It is up to the young children to project the image that their mind will choose among all the representations of animals that they already have in memory, from real life or fiction. Especially designed for this book, the expressive font is meant to be attractive to the little ones who can’t read yet.

 A gratifying abstraction game for young children who will have fun recognizing the colours which are never named, and the animals which are never drawn!

Bastien Contraire
The author and illustrator

An autodidact, Bastien Contraire first developed his work through self-publishing, before dedicating himself to children’s books. It is by designing the covers of a fanzine that he co-edited that he tried out stencils, appreciated the imperatives of this technique and liked the game of superimposing layers of colours. Published in 2016, his first picture book, Les Intrus, displayed naturalist plates hiding an anomaly. It was followed by three board books, Animaux, Véhicules and Aliments. In 2020, he published Au Contraire at Albin Michel Jeunesse.

In parallel with his activity of author and illustrator, he designs exhibitions for children with an experimental and playful approach.