Gondoles et San Giorgio, 2021

Julien Solé  

In 1999, at the end of his engineering studies (Polytechnique, Waters and Forests), Julien Solé went on a trip and began to draw seriously.

He settled in Marseilles but continued to go back and forth between the Orient and France. What is he drawing? Faces, postures, cities and their accumulations. He gradually replaces notebooks and sheets with less conventional supports: rolls that he installs on hand-cranked machines, pages from books and archives that tell the story of the place and that he assembles to form huge frescoes, like the one in the Library of Alexandria (2010).

He has been invited to create exhibitions and installations at the French Institutes of Fez, Addis Ababa and Alexandria, as well as at the Book Fairs of Perpignan and Beirut.

"I consider myself a city visitor, without a mission order: this accumulation of drawings and notes, to whom and what can it be used? I myself don't know anything about it. I don't know whether it is art or mania, tinkering or science If these fragments that I strive to produce and accumulate are a somewhat faithful representation of anything: of a feeling that I had or of a country that perhaps exists."