P O D E V I N    

Jean-Francois Podevin is a highly successful illustrator whose clients include Time magazine, Adobe Software, and many, many others. His illustrations tend to be quite complex and typically, are by turns, both poetic and conceptual.

His persistent success is due to many factors, one of which is his utter command of visual syntax. J.F. is a former student of mine and an occasional collaborator. We have conversed with each other about various aspects of visual syntax over the course of some twenty-five years. I'm not at all sure who's learned the most from these interchanges. In any case, because his work consistently demonstrates so many of the ideas presented in the book, several of his illustrations and studies from his sketchbooks, appear throughout the book.

Jean-Francois sometimes uses visual syntax quite consciously and other times, he is hardly aware that he is using any sort of structure at all. Its safe to say that it has become second nature to him to blend various kinds of syntax within a single visual expression. In the process, he achieves what I consider to be a kind of ideal, wherein he consciously uses visual syntax whenever he chooses, but is never a prisoner of it. By whatever means, and whatever standards, he is an infinitely polymodal illustrator.

The illustration presented here is more of less typical in terms of the level of complexity that has become the hallmark of his oeuvre. Accordingly, there are a number of specific forms of visual syntax interwoven here rather skillfully, even pointedly. (His overtly collage style invites the viewer to participate in the construction of the piece.) An inventory of the modes and devices he has used here provides a substantial list. First off, the entire piece is an unequivocal example of a specific and quite traditional form of compositional syntax. It is an obvious center based composition with elements arrayed on a central axis. (For a certain kind of "timeless" expression, direct axiological structure simply can't be beat.) The full range of positional information exists herein as well. These exist a full set of oppositions, juxtapositions, impositions, and superimpositions, all of which double as extreme foreground, middle ground, but other interpretations might be possible, but all surely would yield a feeling of planar sequence.

Modes unmistakably present include pattern, metamorphosis, spiral, parallel, radial, center and vector, inclusionary, spatial, gravitational, direct, sandwiching, intertwining, and of course misalignment. A good case can be made for extension as well. (The half citrus is by virtue of continuance, experienced as a whole slice.)

Certainly, the composition owes a great deal to line, both supplied and implied. Its difficult to believe that there is no actual lines radiating from beyond the edges of the citrine sun. Tangency as will be noted, is present as well, although minimally. Figured and ground, while always present as a kind of natural condition of visual presentation (or of perception), is not presented here in a reversing figure and ground situation, which is what I intended by the term, the figure and ground mode.

Pattern is everywhere, but is most obvious in the corn-scales of the fish, while graph fountains" in each upper corner, (which are somehow radials-parallels-tangencies), also exactly repeat. The rays in the citrus and the waves in the water are also obvious examples of linear pattern. The fish is of course an uncanny metamorphosis which functions by virtue of the specific device of substitution. The same abstract principle is very much at work both in the case of the citrus substituting for the sun and corn kernels for the scales.The head of the fish and its tail effectively " sandwich" the fish's body, hence the sandwiching mode makes itself felt as well.

The forms of the DNA molecule both spiral and intertwining as mirrored forms and hence simultaneously provide us the experience of the spiral mode and the intertwine mode. They also represent the notion of symmetry and perhaps evoke the idea of the constant rebirth of pattern which sustains all of nature. This calls to my mind, the human genome project which even now reveals to the scientists a deep set of patterns, and perpetuates mankind's preoccupation with the mysteries of our ancestry, a concern we have inherited from our forbears in the Paleolithic. In any case, the almost artless, centering of the forms is an example of direct, orderly placement, and thus evinces the mode which I describe variously as the symmetry mode, the direct mode, or because of its sheer practicality, the convenience mode. (Again, the dicta is, the more interesting the forms, the less any sort of elaborate structure becomes necessary.)

The parallel, and radial modes are quite obviously employed here and in the boxed water, right before our eyes we see parallels transforming themselves into radials. Obviously, the citrus sun also represents the center and vector mode. Centrification is indeed a persistent motif here. (The notion of plural essence, or perhaps of multiple causation, resurfaces persistently in JF's work.) Inclusionary devices are likewise obvious.

The symbolism of containment are made all the more obvious for the presence of an actual frame, but also because, at the bottom, the frame is broken by the rectangle "containing" the waves. The frame is of course, completed by the phenomenon of continuance. Inclusionary mode is always somehow heightened by a fracturing of the inclusion. The spatial mode in a sense, dominates the entire piece, but the gravitational mode, as is so often the case, is bound up in the same general effect; the fish floats so boldly "out of the water", while the water nonetheless, exerts its pull.

Tangency is less present here than is sometimes the case, although the top archways all but form a tangency. The effect is however, clearly present in many of the individual letter forms that rim the image in as much as the letters of our alphabet are
conceived of in terms of that archetypal contrast, the contrast of a straight line and curved one, otherwise known as a tangency. Misalignment, as a principle, often manifests as a deterioration or a breakage, as is suggested by the rumpled background, which sends directionals off toward all quarters. Misalignment in the form of displacement is also present for the way the "box of waves" breaks out of the larger frame.

Finally, the modes of gravity and space and here fairly well intertwined as they so often are. The fish, pointedly out of water, floats effortlessly, and he does so within a framed arena, one that houses a certain amount of atmosphere. The overlapping panel of waves juts out of the water toward the viewer, and the spiral surrounds a core of openness as well, so that there are cumulative feelings of palpable space.

So much for the inventory of models. Instead of pointing out all the individual modes, I might simply have set down the models, icons if you will represented in the image. This list would include the following .........."