Where Fantasy Teases Reality

By EDWARD M. GOMEZ

Stone. Bronze. Oil on canvas. This is the durable stuff that heavy-duty art history is made of. For more than three decades, however, Jean-Michel Folon has taken on serious, humanistic themes with no more than delicate whispers of watercolor on paper. His skill and inventiveness have made him one of the world's best-known commercial artists. Now, in a career-spanning survey on view at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art through June 3, Folon is coming in for the sort of institutional scrutiny rarely afforded an artist whose work is better known from posters and magazines than from trend-setting galleries. Mounted by William S. Lieberman, the Metropolitan's curator of 20th century art, "Folon's Folons" rounds up almost 70 watercolors and prints from the artist's own collection, as well as several objects -- frames, a hand mirror, a ceramic plaque -- that the artist has "transformed" into artworks.

Folon's watercolor-washed world features serpentine arrows, pedestrian- dwarfing buildings and blank-faced men, as well as rainbows, birds and boats. In The Silence, 1974, he makes the enigmatic figure of a sphinx his own. The mythical creature, at rest in a blazing desert landscape, raises one blue finger to its lips to demand tranquillity with an inaudible "Shhh!" The etching titled New York Times, 1974, shows square-headed city folk blown about by the wind as they clutch copies of their favorite paper. Other images add a message to the mirth. The Feast, 1983, packs a chilling political punch: a skull-headed figure sits at a table munching on a sardine-like snack that turns out to be a plateful of missiles.

Folon's career can be seen, the artist proposes ironically, as a testament to the nurturing power of boredom. The son of a Brussels paper wholesaler, Folon quickly came to regard Belgium as "a mental prison, the most boring + place on earth." Art became his means of escape from stifling surroundings, as it was, he suggests, for such other Belgian-born painters as James Ensor and Rene Magritte. Like them, Folon took a strong turn for the fantastic, serving up the quotidian in images dreamy or irreal. But Folon's pictures, compact and whimsical, have always owed more to the purposefully childlike simplicity of Paul Klee than to hallucinatory or surrealistic styles.

Folon was forced to study architecture by his parents; but upon turning 21 in 1955, he packed a small bag of art supplies and bolted for Paris, only six months before he could have received a university diploma. After several apprentice years, he met the artistic director of Olivetti, who gave him his big break commercially by commissioning him to create advertising posters for typewriters and illustrations for books that the firm produced as promotional gifts. (Folon's association with the company continues to this day.) During those early years, Folon, inspired by intrusive street signs, drew clusters of skyscrapers entangled in suffocating thickets of directional arrows. In the current show Anaconda, 1968, offers a vivid treatment of this motif. Folon admits that these frighteningly amusing glimpses of modern urbanism were "my revenge on what I had been taught in architecture school."

Such images amplify some of the artist's main themes. Among them: alienation of modern man in the face of technoculture, as in The Crowd, 1979; the small gestures of everyday life as a form of spectacle, such as a couple's romantic embrace in The Shadows, 1980; and the nourishing, magical power of the imagination itself. This is best represented by a 1987 Self-Portrait. It offers an X-ray view into Folon's head, a sky-blue chamber filled with birds in flight, a place as restless, perhaps, as it is calm. The picture also hints at the identity of the artist's most familiar figure, an anonymous, urban man in a hat and raincoat. Notes Lieberman: "Folon's man is Everyman and, of course, Folon himself."

Folon's work is rooted, quite obviously, in unabashed optimism about life and the sincere belief that being a good citizen should come naturally enough for anyone, anywhere, anytime. Says Milton Glaser, one of the deans of American graphic design and Folon's longtime friend: "The most significant thing an artist can do is change our way of seeing. After viewing Folon's work, you begin to see the world as he does." That vision is compassionate and curious, and more spiritual than sentimental. It is revealed here, where fantasy teases reality, in thoughtful billets-doux to humanity.