Blexbolex

Blexbolex isn’t exactly a painter. He's not really a designer either, nor a draughtsman, and he doesn’t draw cartoons in the strictest sense. Rather, Blexbolex creates illustrated books, book-objects, even, that are dominated by images, and where the words are distorted and convoluted, with their own strange meanings, imbuing the whole with irony and anguish. He might seem an unlikely candidate for a one-man exhibition, but once you see his pages framed and hung on the wall, they give off the singular airs of Tintin and Z movies, a mixture of childlike wonder and nightmarish darkness.

Blexbolex’s career spans more than 20 years. The nomadic gallery Arts Factory’s show reveals a peerless aesthete and skilled silkscreen printer, constantly seeking greater simplicity in his compositions and austerity in his technique. His earlier black and white stencils and the slightly crude drawings give way to assemblages of contrasting colours and forms. The figures no longer have faces, merely red, blue and yellow planes, undefined; they seem liberated from all constraints.