Etienne Robial — Etienne au carré — La MABA — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 5 → December 15, 2019

Etienne Robial is all together a graphic designer, an editor, a collector, a teacher, an artistic director, a former bookseller, and the co-founder of the Festival international de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême… To take the measure of the singularity of this artist, it is enough to say that, although a French graphic designer, he doesn’t make poster or image, works with television and mass media, and did not train in decorative arts but fine arts, and then at the applied arts school of Vevey.

Etienne Robial, Greenfield © Etienne Robial

Following in the avant-garde masters’ footsteps and sharing their pioneer vision, Etienne Robial was also close to the French punk movement and saw the emergence of the national counterculture.

This background –paradoxically?– led him to bring to the institutional framework a taste for formats and proportions defined by regulatory layout, the mechanics of orthogonal shapes, and real colors arranged in primary compositions, as well as a hatred for accentuated capital letters, indicative of a fondness for writing styles he unearths or invents himself.

© Etienne Robial

One should add his peculiar knowledge of printing and poster technique and a joint visual and manual approach that brings about a rigor and precision in many ways preferable to transfixed perfection. Everything but the anecdotal.

Full of these considerations for his own abstract world, the designer works as an artistic direction and does his best to address the concrete requests of those who turn to him and commission projects in full ignorance of the visual matter.

The result is an applied art in all the nobility of the term, as well as a style the MABA intends to explore and exhibit next September. Visitors will have the chance to observe the effects of moving these objects around in the art center.

Etienne Robial, Bukowski. Postier (roman) © Etienne Robial