A Personal Memory of Jean-Michel Folon
Jean-Michel Folon (1934-2005), the Belgian illustrator, painter, and sculptor, seems to have lived within a landscape dense with watercolor glazes, among mountains as vague as theatrical backdrops and multicolored deserts. In his world, city contours blur decisively into the indefinite, and his little men take on an ethereal, fantastic, and magical appearance. The secret of his painting was the aqueous element—the water that soaks the color and lets it glide, mixing it into a collection of rarefied and shimmering graphic signs from which to extract the rainbow of a new world.
Today, the poetic universe created by Folon is showcased at the Kasa dei Libri exhibition space in Milan, in the exhibition titled “Livresse”: a title that recalls the artist’s predilection for book illustration and beyond. On this occasion, one can see a unique collection of exhibition catalogs, drawings, posters, advertisements, vinyl records, stamps, and ceramics. Also featured are his collaborations with companies like Olivetti and Snam, magazines such as The New Yorker, his special relationship with the world of cinema, and even a dinner service he designed for Richard Ginori. It is a creative environment that reconstructs the “images of silence in color,” as he himself chose to define his works.
When he visited Versilia in the summer of 1992 for an exhibition dedicated to posters at Villa La Versiliana in Marina di Pietrasanta, Folon gave my mother, Vera, a poster with a dedication written in pencil—now almost invisible, worn away by the sun’s rays. That poster, currently on display at “Livresse”, hung for years in the kitchen of our home in Vittoria Apuana. My mother chose that spot for a special reason: the steaming ocean liner sailing through the imaginary sea of a coffee cup always put her in a good mood. And so, every morning, she would have breakfast while gazing at that surreal ship, greeting the start of a new day with a smile.
