Biography by Carm Goode

The extraordinary world of Jean-François Podevin, a world where "reality and fantasy meet, clash, and resonate" has become increasingly familiar to us by virtue of his illustrated covers for Time, Newsweek, Business Week, Omni, as well as for the many book jackets, posters and articles he has designed and illustrated.

Podevin literally grew up in the Paris art world, (in his father's painting studio and nearby environs), for a period he studied abroad, "in the states," then returned to Paris to complete his studies, graduating from the École Superieure d'Arts Graphiques (formerly Academy Julian).

In the ensuing years, it has only lately become apparent, he has systematically been forging his own amalgam of old world mythologies and new world attitudes. The fact that he has been able to do so while producing most of his work within "the domain of commerce" is something of a tribute to both his artistic skills and his sense of integrity (and says a great deal about the universality of his themes as well).

Although his work has for years, been collected by connoisseurs, he has shown his work the most part in venues that were more broadly cultural rather than than in actual galleries. For instance, one might come across his work in a poetry quarterly, or a pyschoanalytic journal, or perhaps in some European publication. The result is that there has been a limited awareness of his accomplishment.

This no doubt, is about to change; we can be certain, however, that some things will not be changing; for instance while he is not at all slow in embracing the new technology, neither his artistic vision nor his basic methodology shows any sign of altering; he is deeply committed to his fundamental approach to visual experience.

We could briefly acknowledge some of his methods: in written selections from his Metaphysical Notebooks, (excerpts of which he provides elsewhere in the site), Podevin provides us with clues as to how he works: all of his work centers on an idea, an utterly visual one, a spark of "spontaneous artistic combustion." Regardless of the scale of a work, or of how intricately it has been rendered, each is born of a sketch. Thus, no matter how complete or incomplete, how comprehensive or how deft the beginnings of an idea might seem, it will have to meet a certain of his own criteria, it must, in his words be, "an image capable of retaining its primal energy."

Through his utter mastery of technique, in any or all of several media, he then transforms his original drawings, paint sketches or "notations." (Jean-François says that each medium is like a novel kind of prism, one that lets him look at world in a different light.") In all cases, he works always to preserve much of the spontaneity of his original sketch, even without any sort of perfect understanding of the meaning of his own creations; this perhaps, explains why his work has been characterized as being "intriguing, mysterious, and ominous, a door to be unlocked." There quite literally is no "key" here but rather, a set of intuitions that have been artfully conveyed.