Fotokino

Etienne Robial is multiple. Publisher, he opened up the field of comics during twenty years and shaped one of the most beautiful publishing adventures of the 70’s and 80’s with Futuropolis. Artistic director, he converted the television landscape to the cult of the chromatic circle and the thrilling polygon! Graphic designer, he’s the creator of countless visual identities and has straighten up the design of a fair amount of press titles. Pedagogue, he teaches his students the school of humility (the eraser) and of authority (the grip).

Each facet of his work articulates and combines three fundamental elements of graphic design: alphabets, shapes and colors. This trinity is paired with studies, researches and classifications that remind us of the symptoms of the sweet disease that nourishes his off-peak hours: collectionnite. From drawing tools to kitchen utensils, books and magazines, the list goes on and on of the objects he collects with expertise and method.

If with this exhibition we revealed with delight a (very small) part of Etienne Robial’s collection, we mainly aimed to understand how he draws inspiration from all this collected material, to show what tools he uses on a daily basis (he does not touch computers) and what gymnastics he sets up in order to imagine his own graphical and editorial collections. All this while also returning, in parts on fifty years of creation in the fields of publishing, graphics and audiovisual.