EXHIBITION
François AVRIL

French painter and illustrator

For over thirty years, François Avril (Paris, 1961) has moved between the world of comics and that of contemporary art. From his first collaborations in the 1980s with the magazine press and children's publishing to the exhibitions of his paintings in galleries, François Avril has developed a strong graphic style. Although he has only produced a handful of comic strip albums in the course of his career, Avril retains the rigour of the composition, the strength of the black line and the stylisation. Alongside the influence of 9th Art on his work, notably Chaland, Hergé, Moebius, Herriman and Macherot, Avril pays close attention to the works of Saul Steinberg, Giorgio Morandi, Edward Hopper, Serge Poliakoff, Lionel Feininger and Bram van Velde. Drawing his inspiration from his observations of towns and landscapes, François Avril's works offer a poetic and fresh take on reality. His graphic aesthetic and the rigour of his compositions have made him an artist with a remarkable identity. In both drawing and painting, cities remain one of his favourite subjects. More than a destination, it's the idea of a city that François Avril likes to portray. He likes to assemble construction games, perspectives and vanishing lines. Adopting the point of view of a solitary walker, he recreates the setting of a fantasised city where time and noise seem to stand still. It's a magic that he brings to places like Tokyo, New York and Brussels. In the end, it doesn't matter where he goes, because the place he represents doesn't exist.

Like the great cities, the Breton coasts also nourish the artist's work. Like the cities he rationalised, Avril's landscapes were reinvented in favour of a composition of volumes and harmonious lines. The sea is mastered, the cliffs sculpted and the trees structured. Imagination and memory have as much place in the artist's mind as the places he represents. It would be hard not to see in the same landscape, rather than Brittany, perhaps Iceland, Scotland, Greece, Italy or the coasts of the United States. Interior landscape or city-soul? Avril's world balances realism and abstraction, line and volume, monochrome and colour. A subtle graphic harmony with fragile boundaries. "Whether it's a city or a landscape, I always start with something realistic that I recompose to create utopias. I observe and it's memory that makes the selection. Back in my studio, all I have left is a residue of what I've seen. I keep only a strong composition and the details disappear. It's because of all these liberties I take with my realistic subject that you might think I'm on the verge of abstraction." François Avril.

François Avril's work is regularly exhibited in Paris, Brussels, Dinard, Milan, Geneva and Hong Kong, in galleries, art centres and international fairs...