NAPOLI

Jean-Michel Folon (1934 –2005) Born in Uccle, near Brussels, the son of a paper wholesaler, Folon initially studied architecture, but by 1955 he had abandoned a country he regarded as a "mental prison" and headed for Paris. He ended up living in a gardener's pavilion in Bougival, on the outskirts of the capital, where he spent five years as a draughtsman. By the early 1960s, when he visited the United States, he was selling graphic work to Esquire, Horizon, Atlantic Monthly and Time; by 1964, his drawings were on display at the Librairie Le Palimugre in Paris.Folon's anxieties about the dehumanisation of modern life did not prevent him from celebrating technology when occasion, or a contract, demanded. In the late 1960s he created several advertisements for Olivetti typewriters, in which anonymous men struggled over keyboards or piles of numerals. This was followed a few years later by huge figurative works - representations of landscapes and cities - including those made for various railway stations, like the Metro in Brussels in 1974, and Waterloo in 1975. At the end of the 1960s, he had his first solo exhibitions in New York, Milan and Tokyo, and soon after, alongside magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, he began working for the New York Times. In 1990, the Metropolitan Museum in New York had held a exhibition of his engravings and watercolours, and, five years later, there was a retrospective in Japan. Although based mostly in France, and latterly Monaco, Folon was a great Italophile. It was fitting that his final exhibition, which closed in September, included a spectacular display of his sculptures in the Forte del Belvedere, high above Florence.