At first glance, his drawings and paintings are never signed. But if you look closely, an A like a stone, a V like a blade of grass, an R that stretches, and an I that gets lost, followed by an L elongated like a leaf fallen from a tree, slide to the bottom of its pages. François Avril would, in fact, have no need to add his name to his works. He has a style.
“Everything I draw doesn’t exist”
A real style, refined and unique, both sharp and light, which belongs only to him. In pencil or brush, his touch is so light that one could believe it is paper cutouts, in the style of Matisse. It is, in reality, his line which darts, then runs and breaks at the edge of the canvas. At the beach, and up to the threshold of the horizon, his universe unfolds in successive sections in this book with the perfect title, “Trait de littoral”. In the singular.
“Not everything I draw exists,” confides François Avril. However, we think we recognize a lighthouse here, an island there, a bouquet of cypresses or a church steeple, but everything is revisited and reinvented. Everything appears familiar, but everything remains strange. Because the painter adds his share of shadow and mystery. The sea is sometimes white, yellow, red, ocher, gray, or green, and sometimes even blue. A fantasized vision of Brittany, seen by “this artist with the name of spring”, writes Jean-Luc Coatalem nicely in the preface to this beautiful book, in Italian format.
“Fiction is fantastic, it’s a particle accelerator of reality,” says Coatalem, the writer from Marine crowned with numerous prizes, from the Femina essay to the Deux Magots, including Breizh. François Avril, 63, author of comic strips and around twenty illustrated works, exhibits in Paris, Brussels, Milan, Geneva and Dinard (35). His famous “324 drawings”, published by the Huberty & Breyne gallery, mainly showed urban landscapes, from which this Breton adopted by the Côtes-d’Armor happily escapes here.
“It was the leaden skies that taught me about light,” he concedes. And then, on this indented coast, everything ends up in perspective.” To the point that his drawings could find new life thanks to marquetry. His isolated houses, one of his favorite themes, where only a touch of color indicates a discreet presence, nevertheless link him to the greatest masters. They recall Jean-Baptiste Corot and Nicolas de Staël, illuminating their canvas with a vermilion note.
A line like a high sea mark
“We would think of Poliakoff with a touch of Sempé. Or the opposite,” assures Coatalem, no doubt for the flat areas of color and the clear line. “My black line persists throughout my writing. Whether it’s a tree or a rock,” explains Avril, as virtuoso with Indian ink on paper as with acrylic on canvas. In small formats, as in large ones. For his part, he claims more the influence of Hergé and Mœbius for comics and that of Hopper and Morandi for painting. Its line is ultimately similar to the high water mark, which traces, on the foreshore, a fragile border between reality and abstraction.
“Coastline”, images by François Avril, texts by Jean-Luc Coatalem, ed. Locus Solus, 83 p. €25
