Jean François Ibos was a French artist born in 1951 in Viel-Arcy (France).
After a BA in philosophy, he studied art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse and at the Faculty of Art History.
Ibos worked and won awards in theater and costumes and also in the display of women’s fashion and tapestry, but it is as a painter and print-maker that he acquired an international reputation.
Although he was a highly original talent, he stood squarely in a tradition going back not merely to the decorative arts of the last century, but to an aesthetic as old as Periclean Athens.
The classical simplicity of Ibos’ compositions, suggestive of Japanese art, but entirely European in treatment, is both decorative and voluptuous. Ibos worked in serigraphy using as much as 30 colors, along with gold leaf, producing an almost unearthly subtlety of shading, yet his design clearly finds its inspiration in natural forms.
The subjects of Ibos’ paintings and prints are no less deceptively simple than his sense of design. He frequently drew from nature, seasons, rays, flowers, feathers, transforming them with an infinitely subtle mind, which perceives natural phenomena in terms of myth and archetype.
Jean-François Ibos died in 1992. For his friend Gérard Gentou, Ibos was brilliant and deep. Fashion was his element. He even presented his work to the Dior institutions, where nine of his models came out later.
