Jean-Michel Folon was born in Brussels in 1934. He started drawing early — as the son of a paper merchant, raw materials were easily accessible to him. Encouraged by his precocious proficiency, Folon enrolled in a long artistic curriculum, first at the École d’Art St-Luc, and then the École nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre, where he studied industrial design. There, he heard a maxim that would become his aesthetic mantra for the rest of his career: Mies Van der Rohe’s ‘less is more’. During these formative years, his first drawings were published in local periodicals (Moustique and Pan).
Folon dropped out of school and left for Paris in 1955 to seek out new opportunities. For five uninterrupted years, he drew on a daily basis. Unfortunately, he received little attention in Paris for the results of this intense creative period. Undeterred, the resourceful Folon turned to New York, where he sent his drawings. Horizon, Esquire and The New Yorker published these spontaneous submissions. America was calling, and Folon responded. Fortune, Atlantic Monthly and Time Magazine all offered him new opportunities. From America to Italy to Japan and back to France, the artist built up his profile.
In 1973, after the successful publication of an illustrated version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Folon was selected to represent his native Belgium at the São Paulo Art Biennial, where he was awarded the Grand Prize. From this point onwards, Folon received an influx of opportunities for artistic collaboration in all forms: publication covers, metro station designs, solo exhibitions (at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, for example), festival posters, concept design, monumental public murals, literary illustrations of renowned historic and contemporary authors and theatre set design. He was even occasionally cast in roles in animation and film, most notably as the leading man in L’Amour Nu (1981).
Retrospectives of his work logically followed. His posters were exhibited in Paris in 1984, Osaka and Kamakura in 1985 and Lausanne’s Olympic Museum in 1996. Florence organised his largest anthological exhibition to date in 2005.
In 1988, Folon was asked by Amnesty International to illustrate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the UN’s six official languages. Two years later, his watercolours and first transformed objects were displayed in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From this point on, Folon became increasingly interested in sculpture and environmental consciousness. The Belgian coast became one of his favourite means of illustrating these two themes in his later work.
In 2000, the Folon Foundation was created in the Solvay domain, a protected domain just outside Brussels in La Hulpe, where the artist spent time during his childhood. The foundation was expanded and revamped in 2004. In 2015, an offshoot project called ‘L’atelier Folon’ was set up in Monaco to promote the artist’s legacy in the principality.
