Aller/Voir/Pouvoir/Faire, Michel Lepetitdidier
The exhibition "Aller/voir/pouvoir/faire" focuses on the work of the French graphic designer Michel Lepetitdidier, member of the International Graphic Alliance (AGI) since 2003.
It traces the career of more than thirty years of practice of this discreet figure of graphic design - who also signs "Le Petit Didier", a mark of his modesty. The important work of Michel Lepetitdidier, who notably signed visual identities for the Louvre Museum and the Nicéphore Niépce Museum in Chalon-sur-Saône, is still too little known, although it has marked the French visual landscape.
Since his beginnings, at the end of the 1980s, in Metz, he has been the author of a work that is both plastically strong and imbued with a certain rationalism. While the opposition between Swiss Style and Polish School still made an impression during his apprenticeship in the fine arts, the designer has since his beginnings followed a ridge path between these two heritages.
« Since the 1990s, Michel Lepetitdidier has built a special relationship with the image based on a simple grammar of forms, stemming in particular from constructivism. [...]
He forged the image of the Nicéphore-Niépce museum (Chalon-sur-Saône), an identity marked by modernist aesthetics. [...] Patiently, without artifices, Michel Lepetitdidier puts in focal a kinetics in fixed compositions.
This vocabulary, the graphic designer has always put it at the service of a reading of so-called artistic images. Convinced by this minimalist art of construction, the typographer and graphic designer Damien Gautier noted for the art magazine 50sept that "Michel Lepetitdidier plays with the quality and the very nature of the images to establish compositions that are renewed on each page".» - Vanina Pinter,Art historian, teacher of graphic design history and theory at ESADHaR (Le Havre).
« With this exhibition, we invite you to discover the work of this rare graphic designer, a man engaged in the design of poetic, sensitive but also useful forms, in search of the absolute, meaning and quality. A man who thus demonstrates his deep esteem for others. »
Damien Gautier and Florence Roller, editor (Éditions deux-cent-cinq) of the book Le Petit Didier, published in May 2021, curators of the exhibition.
Exhibition from Friday November 24, 2023 to Sunday February 24, 2024, in partnership with Le Signe, Centre national du graphisme.
