design&designer

This second edition dedicated to Alain Le Quernec presents his more recent works. For the past thirty years, he has been designing mostly political, social and cultural posters without any concessions to advertising. A period spent in Warsaw in the 1970s studying with Henryk Tomaszewski was to have a decisive influence on his artistic career. Le Quernec, Breton to the core and passionate about Poland, is a politically committed artist.

Nourished by popular culture, rock music and comics, Bazooka’s unfettered creativity took them on a mind-boggling journey through print and graphics. The trashy and in-your-face style of these graphic commandos found outlets in their street interventions and in their daily destructuring of daily newspaper Libération. Their fanzines – such as Loukhoum breton, Activité sexuelle normale, le Bulletin-périodique and Un regard moderne – truly testify to a era pulsing with freedom and provocation. With unregardmoderne.com, they are now reworking news images to accentuate or subvert their meaning.

Born in 1971 in Pittsburgh, Dave Kinsey uses his everyday environment as a framework that he then revisits in his paintings. In 1996 he founded BLK/MRKT, creating graphics that combine his urban aesthetic with the sophistication of conventional communication. Kinsey today is an artist who is emblematic of the international urban contemporary art scene – a status reflected by the success of his 2001 show with Mambo, a member of French artistic collective 9eme Concept, at Galerie Magda Danysz, Paris, and more recently at Manchester’s Urbis Museum.

Poster designer / illustrator Ronald Curchod, a member of the AGI, is reinventing what it means to create. Through his pictorial approach and his use of photography, he is reorienting and enriching the graphic designer’s profession. He creates worlds laced with desire and poetry, which give rise to hybrid, chimerical creatures. After several years in advertising, he decided to work for the cultural sector. His elegant, silent perspective on humans, animals and nature brings the viewer face to face with his imaginative realm. He has published books of his art, and regularly exhibits his paintings.

A true architect of text, Pierre di Sciullo takes letters on a journey to undiscovered lands. He stages typographic constructions in space, and reveals the polysemic nature of characters by blending writing and visual design. Keen to invent new reading situations, he has designed numerous typefaces including Quantange, Minimum, Gararond, Aligourane, Durmou and Maximum. The exhibition “Mot à mot” that took place during the 15th issue of the International Poster and Graphic Arts Festival of Chaumont, showed some of his typographic research.

London graphics duo, founded in London in 1998, divide their time between commissions and experimentation, and draw much of their inspiration from urban culture (hip hop, graffiti, etc.).

Patricia de Gorostarzu has been a professional photographer since 1990, building a sensitive and coherent body of work through her encounters and travels around the world.

An art director and illustrator, KRSN cut his teeth on the graffiti scene in the early 1990s. Without ever forgoing his aerosol sprays and Posca paint pens, he has developed a personal style shot through with dark irony.

“We’ve all got a Massin at home”, announced the exhibition in Strasbourg dedicated to him in 1995, and the event’s title certainly wasn’t stretching the truth when you consider the career of this French graphic designer, who started out in the 1950s and whose influence on French publishing is still very tangible today. He is a master of many trades: typographer, graphic designer, photographer and writer.

The American artist Dalek (the name on his passport is James Marshall) has in just a few years become a prominent figure on the urban graphic design stage, whose ranks feature personalities such as Miss Van, Banksy and Space Invader.