François Avril
Présentation
Elegant silhouettes fly from François Avril's dancing pencil; the city is transformed into a setting for new graphic adventures and Paris evenings are filled with the sound of jazz. Magazine and advertising illustrator, cartoonist and children's book illustrator, this Parisian artist, born in 1961, is a veritable master of clean lines, weightless forms and poetic colour.
Following his dazzling debut in the fanzine Band' à Part, Avril created a series of spare albums marked by a distinctive aesthetic, including Doppelgänger SA, Le Voleur de ballerines and Le Chemin des 3 places. He also produced covers for Lire and Libération and brilliantly illustrated a number of children's books. Prints, engravings, newspaper cartoons, advertising, when it comes to drawing, everything interests François Avril.
His comic book creations travel between Geneva and Amsterdam. He sketches New York and paints Cancale. Working in a faux-naïf style, he shows off his talent from Paris to Tokyo. He depicts Manhattan and Brussels, and he paints Perros Guirec. Using watercolours, colour pencils, acrylics and pastels, he is constantly seeking to explore new avenues of creativity.
As comfortable working in miniature as he is with large-scale canvases, Avril aspires to an aesthetic purity that comes close at times to abstraction. His works are intriguing. With François Avril, a single detail can be enough to unsettle our senses. He draws his inspiration from the great originators of the American comic strip and the giants of the Franco-Belgian golden age. One of the founders of the Ecole de Pigalle, along with Jacques de Loustal, Dupuy and Berbérian, Avril has been reinventing the 9th Art since the 1980s, delicately wielding his pencil to create minimalist drawings that are consistently focused on the essential line.
