There are many reasons that I became a poster designer. For sure one of them has to do with women. When I was a kid, I remember that my first traumatic experience of being exposed to women was actually when I was taking my daily Sunday walk with my parents in the streets of Paris. I remember exactly when for the first time, I faced a poster of Bernard Villemot. The poster was an advertisment for a water brand: Contrex. It was about 7 feet tall, and it showed a naked woman (with a bracelet) hugging a bottle of water. I was shocked to see an elegant woman naked in the street, and with such a pretty haircut and make up. I couldn't stop staring at this image: the color of her skin, her deep dark eyes, and her smile totally hypnotized me. I could almost smell her perfume and hear her voice. I wanted to be this bottle of water so bad. I remembered hating this brand after that for torturing me so much.

Last week, after more than 30 years, I finally saw this woman again at the opening of Villemot exhibition in Paris. For the first time ever, a huge retrospective of his work is taking place in the castle of the Forney's Library by the Marais area in Paris.

By the way, I always found his name very appropriate for a poster artist. If you translate it word by word in english, his name will be:Villemot => Ville mot => City word ... The words of the street!

My passion for his work—as you probably noticed already—has no limit. His posters are the best that I have ever seen. For all the french poster artists post world war II, Villemot is probably the most painter-like of all of them. When you look at his collection of posters it's obvious that he always found the way to make a piece of art out of a product's advertising. For decades, Villemot was the master of advertising posters in France, he created the advertising of the most important brands of the time. His works for the soda Orangina or Perrier, for the shoe brand Bally, or for the Champagne Mercier became landmarks in the french culture.

Women are everywhere in his posters, and I think that he probably tried to define THE perfect french woman:

She has some long legs...

... she almost always crossed them, giving her an attitude of delicatesse...

In a train or in a beach, she always sleeps with jewerly, pretending that she is never totally naked...

She is also very passionate and she is always ready to prove it, by taking her bikini off...

Thank you Monsieur Villemot for opening my eyes to Poster art, and to the beauty of a woman.

"A poster is like a girl walking downtown streets, popular and aristocratic. Sometimes the flower in between the cobblestone, sometimes queen of the fence, she is offering herself to everyone without never losing her respect for herself." R. Savignac