Exhibition main visual

In November, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris presented his major retrospective "Étienne Robial's Graphic Design and Collection In November, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris opened his major retrospective "Etienne Robiard Graphic Design and Collection, from Futuroscope to Canal+", which presents the career of this innovator in a multifaceted system of elements. Beginning with the youthful years of the Futuroscope bookstore (1972-1994) and continuing through the Canal+ period and the creation of the On/Off studio (1982-present), the exhibition traces Etienne Robiard's extraordinary career through posters, drawings, videos, books and furniture.

The Chinese people from Futuroscope to Canal+
Etienne Robial was born in 1945 in Rouen, France and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Rouen and the Ecole des Arts et Crafts in Vevey, Switzerland. His design career began around 1970 as Art Director of Barclay Records, Flipacchi Publishing ...... The prolific and eclectic Etienne Robiard was Art Director of French TV stations Canal+ and M6 at a time when French advertising films were experiencing Etienne Robiard redefined the art of "television packaging" by creating the visual packages for Canal+ and M6 during a golden age of visual effects. He was also involved in the production and rebranding of many mainstream French magazines, providing design solutions and inspiration: from Le Point, France's most important weekly news magazine, to Télérama, a weekly TV magazine, from Les Inrockuptibles, a rock magazine, to the recent L'Équipe. In 2006, he received the Promax Broadcast Design Award for Outstanding Achievement.

Cover of To Be Continued, 1977

Futuroscope is now a well-known French comic book publisher, named after the first French science fiction comic book Futuroscope, published in 1937, and founded by Etienne Robiard. An avid fan of comics, he and his friend Florence Cestac took over the Futuroscope bookstore in 1972 and used it as a base to explore and promote French comics. The "Etienne Robiard Graphic Design and Collection" exhibits the covers of two of France's leading comics magazines of the 1970s, Métal Hurlant and À Suivre, whose logos were designed by Etienne Robiard. In 1974, Futuroscope started to do self-publishing, with anthologies for young cartoonists such as Tardi, Moebius, Joost Swarte and Ever Meulen, and the bookstore became a joyful secret base for young Parisian cartoonists.

Cover of "Roaring Metal", 1975

Amélie Gastaut, curator of the exhibition and chief curator of the graphic design and advertising department of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, commented, "Etienne Robial was very insistent on getting social recognition for author comics and promoting the long black and white comic format." Baudoin or Tardi illustrated the famous novel Journey to the End of the Night with a comic strip, and it became one of the best-selling albums of Futurama Press.
In 1982, Etienne Robial founded the On/Off design studio, and the turning point in his career was a meeting with Pierre Lescure, one of the founders of Canal+, France's first private television channel, notable for its stand-out visual identity and creativity.

M6 Logo, On/Off productions 1987

"In the 1980s Etienne Robiard redesigned the TV channel logo to make it a brand." says curator Emery. After this, the TV channel became a brand with a logo, instantly recognizable by the colorful colors of the different channels. Since its creation in 1984, Etienne Robial has been the artistic director of the channel, and he has also created graphic logos for various sports or cultural institutions (PSG, CNC, RSA) and perfected a scalable graphic system.

L'Équipe Magazine Logo, On/Offproductions 2016

Design inspiration for avid collectors

In addition to the graphic works, the exhibition reveals the creator's private art collection. As an avid collector, Etienne Robiard assembled a large collection of design masterpieces from the 20th century Modernist and Functionalist movements, such as glassware by Wilhelm Wagenfeld, table lamps and alarm clocks by Marianne Brandt, and calculators by Dieter Rams for Braun's calculator, among others.
Etienne Robiard marked the times with his work and never stopped reinventing forms. The exhibition places special emphasis on the tools necessary for graphic creation: rulers, duckbill pens, round gauges, pencils, automatic pencils ...... He says: "When I was teaching, the hard task was to make students understand that what you were doing was joyful work and that you had to stroke paper and pencils, something that computers cannot do. On the other hand, the computer is a brilliant tool for execution and can achieve perfection, but a line made by hand with a knife or a long brush has a life that a computer-made line does not have. The same is true of music, where an instrument cannot vibrate without the plucking of the hand and the blowing of the mouth."
From room to room, the public is immersed in the world of what the graphic designer thinks and sees, gradually learning about the designer's entire creative process around objects. First, in connection with the Bauhaus movement, such as his reproduction of Gerrit Rietveld's red and blue chair from 1923 to understand how the wood plywood was put together, Etienne Robiard used this chair as a starting point to create the "Gerrit Alphabet " as a tribute to Rietveld.
He was also inspired by industrial hooks, SNCF train track sections, and even a Moroccan grate for brushing carpets. With a window display of old vacuum coffee machines from 1924 that look like chemical instruments, followed by old circular switches from the 1950s, Etienne Robial draws inspiration from everyday objects and applies the original shapes of these objects to the alphabetic forms he creates, transforming the beauty of practical objects into abstract shapes, colors and the alphabet - -the three basic elements of his designs.
Starting with Etienne Robial, who has conceptualized commercial packaging for everything from magazines to television channels, he has said, "Design is not just a story about aesthetics and graphics, but also about identity, with the goal of identifying and promoting a message, not so much 'looking pretty'. " The exhibition reveals a way of working that no longer exists in the field of graphic design today; paper, pen, hand-drawn lines that carry emotional tension and remain evergreen over time.

Article Source:艺术与设计

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