Stéphan Muntaner

One day of the international jury, the critic Adrian S., confided to me about the work of Stephan Muntaner, that he judged it “too much French”, too French! This very British anathema which excludes everything that does not comply with the orthodox ergonomics which drives Anglo-Saxon and Swiss graphic approaches can also turn out to be a rather flattering compliment. The graphics of Stephan Muntaner do not fall into the category of research graphics conceptualized around the notion of avant-garde, and never had the pretension. No, his creations are indeed defined in a filiation of a graphic design which has absorbed a certain literary heritage. That of a game with words that manipulates humor and images. In the “schoolboy” tradition of Alfred Jarry, surrealist by Pierre Dac or semantics by Pierre Desproges. In fact a real “French” graphic design which, from Lautrec to Grapus, from Excoffon to MM, manipulates rhetoric and debate. And asks the question of the status of the image in our society. Our opponents, across the Channel, often speak of a “failure” of the transition to modernity, forgetting the inventions of storytelling in images which has become comics, cinema and the surrealist movement. And in the twenties, of what will become one of the most important communication groups, Publicis where some hooks were developed, Dubo, Dubon, Dubonnet and Dim, today part of our cultural heritage. Inventions where the image, failing to speak of forms, becomes more literal than visual. Stephan Muntaner's visuals are talkative. They "chat", they say in the South. Posters, corporate identities, campaigns speak more than they show. The response to its sponsors very often involves visual stories, puns and verbs. The 90s saw graphic design emancipate itself in France. Leave the “socio-cultural” ghetto in which he found himself to respond to orders from the cultural industry and assert the notion of author in the economic sector. From Tous des K to Cktre, Stéphan Muntaner also participated in this movement. But nothing exceptional in all of this, if not one point: that of having also battled for the cultural rebirth of a city with a signature, “Made in Marseille” and built a graphic approach recognized nationally and internationally. Iconoclastic seducer, the graphics of Stéphan Muntaner deserve well from this difficult to tame and often caricatured Marseille city. And it is in the image of its author whose following apostille attempts to identify, not without derision, some traits of his personality. Pierre Ponant Curator, critic, teacher.