The directory «Artists»

Folon Jean-Michel
(1934—2005)

The Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon created a brand of slick surrealism that lent itself readily to the covers of magazines like the New Yorker and Le Nouvelle Observateur, and poster campaigns. In 1989 his bold style and imagery featured in the symbol for the 200th anniversary of the French revolution, a striking - and, for a while, ubiquitous - logo of three soaring birds.

It was as a graphic artist that Folon was able to express himself most successfully. He proclaimed his humanitarian sympathies with eloquent posters for such organisations as Unicef, Greenpeace and Amnesty International. In 1991 he designed four stamps for the Royal Mail to honour the work of European astronomers at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in the Canary Islands.

His designs often included a conventionally dressed Everyman figure, with a stereotypical brimmed hat and arrows instead of eyes, marooned in an empty landscape or penned in by slablike skyscrapers. As Folon put it, "we live surrounded by boxes." In 1967 he even represented the Statue of Liberty with prison bars around her mouth.

Born in Uccle, near Brussels, the son of a paper wholesaler, Folon initially studied architecture, but by 1955 he had abandoned a country he regarded as a "mental prison" and headed for Paris. He ended up living in a gardener's pavilion in Bougival, on the outskirts of the capital, where he spent five years as a draughtsman. By the early 1960s, when he visited the United States, he was selling graphic work to Esquire, Horizon, Atlantic Monthly and Time; by 1964, his drawings were on display at the Librairie Le Palimugre in Paris.

Folon's anxieties about the dehumanisation of modern life did not prevent him from celebrating technology when occasion, or a contract, demanded. In the late 1960s he created several advertisements for Olivetti typewriters, in which anonymous men struggled over keyboards or piles of numerals.

The clarity and directness of his images meant he was also receiving commissions for monumental murals: his first was in 1968, when he decorated the French pavilion at the Milan Triennale with a 36 metre polyester strip, adorned with an abstract pattern of more than 500 luminous points. This was followed a few years later by huge figurative works - representations of landscapes and cities - including those made for various railway stations, like the Metro in Brussels in 1974, and Waterloo in 1975. At the end of the 1960s, he had his first solo exhibitions in New York, Milan and Tokyo, and soon after, alongside magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, he began working for the New York Times.

Apart from Everyman, the most common character in Folon's work is a hybrid creature, with a human body, multicoloured wings and perhaps a monstrous beak. Absurdly liberating, the figure reappears in numerous contexts. In 1972, he even turned it into a knitted nylon kite: after all, "when one flies, one is free. Kites can hold conversations with the wind."

This fanciful, lighthearted tone made Folon an ideal illustrator for the tales of Jean de La Fontaine and Lewis Carroll, although he was able to indulge his darker side in an edition of Kafka's Metamorphosis in 1973, and he also worked on books by Ray Bradbury and Jacques Prévert. His instinctive sense of drama led him into design for opera, experimental theatre, cinema and television, and, in 1967, he made a short feature, Le Cri, with the director Alain Resnais. In the mid-1970s, his usual cast of characters appeared in animations for the French Antenne 2 channel.

In 1992, Folon produced a series of watercolours accompanying the African-American novelist Ralph Waldo Ellison's Invisible Man, in which the washes of paint suggested an appropriately immaterial quality. In 1990, the Metropolitan Museum in New York had held a exhibition of his engravings and watercolours, and, five years later, there was a retrospective in Japan. Although based mostly in France, and latterly Monaco, Folon was a great Italophile. It was fitting that his final exhibition, which closed in September, included a spectacular display of his sculptures in the Forte del Belvedere, high above Florence.

Folon had plenty of contact with the rich and powerful. Jacques Chirac counted him as a friend, and his funeral in Monaco was attended by Prince Albert II. He left a museum in the farm of the Chateau de la Hulpe outside Brussels, whose profits are dedicated to helping the disabled. He is survived by his wife Paola and by a son, François, from his first marriage, to the artist Colette Portal.

France, 1998, «X-Files» poster

France, 1998, Scene from «X-Files»

France, 1998, Mulder and Scully

France, 1998, Mulder