fkdl

Franck Duval, known as FKDL, is a French artist born in Paris in 1963. He studied fashion design at Studio Berçot and trained in circus arts at Annie Fratellini's national school — two formative experiences that shaped his enduring feel for colour, clothing and movement. In the mid-1980s he turned to painting, creating characters in acrylic and ink, and began exhibiting in 1992 at alternative Parisian venues.

In the early 2000s he discovered the "art scotch" technique, invented by Gil Joseph Wolman in 1963: using adhesive tape, he lifts images from fashion and cinema magazines of the 1920s to 1970s and reassembles them on new surfaces. He adopted the pseudonym FKDL at this point. In 2006, during the "Aux arts citoyens" event at the Blancs Manteaux, he entered the urban art world by creating black paper silhouettes dressed in these vintage collages and pasting them in the streets around his studio on Rue Saint-Maur.

His colourful, offbeat characters, touched with gentle irony, appear in Paris, Berlin, London, New York, Barcelona, Turin and as far as French Guiana and Guadeloupe. He has exhibited at the Halle Saint-Pierre, Le Bon Marché and the Since Upian Gallery, and features in several publications including Paris: From Street to Gallery (2013). "I simply want to brighten the city and life, with just a touch of derision and colour."