The Gallery, 2010

François Avril   Emerging artists

François Avril, was born in 1961 in Paris, he is a major figure of comic strip as an art. A graduate of the National Superior School of Applied Arts and Crafts, he started his career as an illustrator for the press, advertising and publishing. He began doing comic strips in the 80s. His work on pencil was solicited by numerous magazines, "Liberation", "Marie Claire" and "Lire". Accompanied by illustrators and authors of comic strips, he founded the School of Pigalle where their works were published in the magazine P.L.G."

His work oscillates between cartoons and contemporary art. Cities and landscapes are his leitmotifs, with an increased relationship of horizontality /verticality, silent city/ infrastructure, perspective / miniature. Indeed, thin and slender silhouettes punctuate his drawings in the middle of a large-scale graphic universe. François Avril distills jazz notes in the midst of the Parisian nightlife to sketch a dynamism and an impetus peculiar to the rhythms of the metropolises ... But emptiness and silence remain, the impetus confronts then a moment suspended as well as a delicacy of features. The line is simple, depicting weightless shapes and poetic hues. Aesthetic purity makes him tend towards abstraction in which a sense of detail is played out. With subtlety, the tiny can manage to disturb, even bifurcate, the meaning of narration.

He has done many children's books, as well as comic books and prints in limited editions. He regularly exhibits his work on canvas or paper in Paris, Geneva, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dinard, Strasbourg and Tokyo.