Jean Mallard

Born in Paris in 1997, he quickly fell in love with drawing and decided never to part with it again. He joined the École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris in 2015, where he learnt comic strips, cartoons, screen printing and engraving. His favourite techniques are watercolour and gouache, which have been with him since childhood, and with which he imagines infinite, dense and colourful worlds. His universe is inspired by popular Russian painters, Indian and Arab miniatures, Japanese prints and naive painters...

Jean creates landscapes and is nourished by those he discovers: he leaves to live in Naples in 2019, where he creates a series of paintings that will give birth to his very first exhibition "Via Miracoli". Since then, he has been drawing for books, articles, cinema posters, records, and making frescoes...

His talent as a storyteller of places was made for the scale of Iberian Leather: "I loved illustrating the book of the Iberian Leather perfume, which was intriguing to try to draw a smell. I looked at the colours the perfume evoked in me to create a chromatic range in my drawings. The strength of the perfume led me to deep colours, intense blacks, bright reds... I didn't know the Iberian peninsula well, so I used my imagination completely, creating a dreamlike space in which this big lion wanders."