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A striking, silent, frontal composition in which Jean Jacquelin stages a scene of apparent simplicity within a desert-like space saturated with yellow light: a solitary man walks along a perfectly straight road, suitcase in hand, jacket over his shoulder. On the horizon, a line of clouds suggests the smoke of a departing train, a discreet symbol of leaving or abandonment.
His stylized face, red and dark, draws the eye with its stark frontality, poised between restrained emotion and abstract figuration: everything here evokes the solitude of the modern traveler, a silent quest, the tension between movement and stillness.
In a few clean flat tones, Jacquelin distills an existential parable, in the graphic tradition of the humanist poster artists of the postwar period. Through its symbolic power and formal restraint, this work joins the great images of the human condition — wandering, waiting, passage. A rare and poetic milestone in Jacquelin’s body of work.
It was at the age of ten that Jean Jacquelin discovered, with wonder, Eugène Vavasseur’s Ripolin posters. Born in Paris, he entered the École supérieure de dessin Germain Pilon in 1920, then joined the advertising agency TAP (Travaux artistiques de publicité) as a draftsman. Artistic director of the Step agency from 1929, he produced several film posters from 1940 onward while continuing his work as a commercial artist for numerous industries: automobiles (Peugeot, Delage, Simca, Buick, Fiat), energy (Antar, Esso, Shell), the press and publishing (Paris-Soir, L’Intransigeant, Éditions Froissart, Presses de la Cité), fashion (Scandale, Magasin Le Printemps), retail (Coop, Vittel, Brandt, Champagne Mercier), and the tourism, travel and leisure sector (Air France, SNCF, Aéropostale, Compagnie Transatlantique, Les Châteaux de la Loire, 24 Heures du Mans, Semaine du cinéma, Casino d’Enghien).
He is also well known as the illustrator of the dust jackets for Georges Simenon’s novels published by Presses de la Cité (some thirty titles from the 1950s are original compositions, executed with the novelist’s oversight and approval).