I have always wanted to fly freely, to talk to the wind and the sky.

(Jean-Michel Folon), (“FOLON: Agency of Imaginary Journeys,” Tokyo Station Gallery)

Not many people may be familiar with the name of Jean-Michel Folon. However, seeing the posters for Olivetti typewriter (Lettera 32 Olivetti per tutti, 1967), Greenpeace (Greenpeace Deep Deep Trouble, 1986), Winter Paralympics 1996 (Le sport sauve, 1996), and numerous magazine cover designs for The New Yorker, TIME, Esquire, and others, reminisce the subtle colours and symbolic imagery of the popular Belgian artist of the 20th century.

Tokyo Station Gallery is showing “FOLON: Agency of Imaginary Journeys,” the artist’s first major retrospective in Japan in thirty years. Through the cooperation of Fondation Folon, Embassy of Belgium, and Wallonie-Bruxelles International, the extensive exhibition covers over 230 works in various media—coloured ink, watercolour, print, etching, photography, and sculpture from the 1960s to early 2000s.

The exhibition title describes Folon’s imaginary voyages that transported him across parallel dimensions of the natural world and humanity. Some images project harsh realities dealing with environmental and social issues, oppression, violence, discrimination and war, and keep the viewer at bay with how our world has evolved complexly and complacently.

Folon had always been passionate about drawing since childhood. As a teenager, he encountered a mural by René Magritte—some shades of which can be traced in his works. He remarked, “One can really do anything in painting. Even invent mysteries... that was when I encountered art.” This realisation guided him through his journeys of imagination.

From Brussels, he moved to Paris in 1955 to pursue his artistic dream. He started out as a press cartoonist, and soon reached popularity by sending his drawings to New York. There, his illustrations began to appear in The New Yorker, TIME, Esquire, Fortune, Horizon, and Atlantic Monthly in the 1960s.

The man with a little hat—two black dots for the eyes, a straight-lined mouth, and a coat—is a character often seen in Folon’s pictures and engravings. The image attributes to similar scenes in Magritte’s paintings or Chaplin’s films. The man or men may be wandering in a maze of loneliness, or confused among a crowd of strangers. In essence, the character could be any of us or strangely inexistent. An example on display is a coloured ink picture of a throng of such men with red eyes, in blue coats and hats, standing against a vivid blue-washed background. The presence feels haunting and mysterious. Likewise, in Unusual (original work for the cover of The New Yorker magazine, 1976), we are mystified by the man whose blue hat turns red in a mirror reflection. Folon seems to insinuate that we may not seem who we really are in introspection.

Arrows also float conspicuously in his works. Usually, they serve as necessary indicative guide marks for travel directions. Yet, Folon perceives them as control ”pushers” that dictate our emotions, ideas, and personal judgement. He debated that, in fact, we need to defend ourselves against the transgressive authority of arrows in our lives. This theme is seen in La Jungle des villes (1970), Toutes les directions (1970s), and Le quotidien (1978), among other intriguing works.

As the end of the 1990s was drawing near, Folon expressed fears about the dark future, wrapped around destruction of nature, nuclear weapons, war, urban disease, and socio-ecological imbalance. His acute sensitivity towards universal issues rendered him exclusive features in magazines with wide readership. Greenpeace Deep Deep Trouble (1988) is one powerful work that exposes a threatening message of the natural environment’s exploitation, as we see torpedoes, instead of fish, swimming beneath the ocean. Folon has mastered his watercolor techniques, transmitting light, transparency and calm colour gradation, almost depictive of William Turner, whom he was immensely impressed by. As illustrated in this work, the progressing shades of blue, green and orange are eye-catching. It can be said that watercolours fortified the artist’s aesthetic prowess.

Alongside ecological concerns, Folon also kept up with technological innovations. Before the first Apple Macintosh was launched in 1984, Steve Jobs approached Folon to create a “Mac Man” that would “live” inside every Mac computer. Folon came up with a humorous image of the Apple logo embedded in a man’s brain. The project, however, did not materialise, but stamps a perfect footprint in Apple’s history after forty years.

Other subjects Folon interpreted in his works are war, space, human rights, birds, and horizons. Several pieces, such as Nixon vanquer (ca. 1968) and Danse de mort (original work for the cover of The Atlantic magazine, January 1984), demonstrate the conflicts between U.S. and the former Soviet Union by insertion of their flags among missiles. Outer space expeditions inspired Folon to explore astronomy in relation to human reality, with works like Les trous du ciel (1971) and Je vous écris d'un pays lointain (1972), both in sparkling blue spectrums. In 1988, he was commissioned by Amnesty International to work on the book cover of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The product showed colourful birds in flight that seem to cry for freedom.

A room with eleven small bronze sculptures introduces Folon’s attempt of a new media that he embarked on after the 1980s. The bronze human figures are shaped with heads of a spoon, fork, pretzel, flower pot, building, musical instrument, and so on, echoing Native American and African tribal art and Surrealism. Two life-size sculptures in his typical man-in-a-hat image include Le Secret (1999). At first, the man appears ordinary, like anyone walking in the park or strolling down the street, but up close, his fontal body is split into two, from top to bottom. We are stunned by the dark cavity that reveals his insides to the outer world.

A gallery of posters and magazine covers brings the viewers closer to the artist’s temporal world where he always hoped peace and environmental and human awareness would prevail.

Folon passed away at 71 years old in 2005 in Monaco. His sublime watercolours continue to sprinkle patches of messages throughout the forest park surrounding the Fondation Folon that he himself established in 2000.