Jofo

Jean-François Duplantier, who signs his work Jofo, is a painter based in Bordeaux. Born in 1961, he studied architecture and submitted a diploma project in which he drew his ideal house, "La maison de OUI-OUI et son toto d’architecte". It was during those years that he found, in the attic of the family house in Dax, a drawing he had made as a child: a Father Christmas sketched at the age of five. That silhouette became his signature character, Toto — round forms outlined in black, with wide, puzzled eyes. Diploma in hand, Jofo set building aside and turned to painting and the visual arts.

For more than thirty years Toto has run through the whole of his work. The character appears in scenes of everyday life and tells stories that are at once private and universal. Jofo builds his grounds first — flat fields of colour, stripes, dots, speckles, blots, drips, collage — then composes the scene, always beginning with the character’s eye. He paints on many supports and regularly leaves the canvas to work on salvaged material: engravings, rock posters, photographs, street maps, wallpaper.

Since 1989 he has recorded the events of the day in his paintings and drawings, from the fall of Ceausescu to the gilets jaunes, from 11 September 2001 to Covid, from the war in Ukraine to religious conflict. The city is his other ground. In 1995 he made "Le Cylindre à Totos", a 200 m² monumental work at the heart of the Forum des Halles in Paris, destroyed in 2012; in 1999 the façade of the children’s hospital in Bordeaux; in 2003, 170 signage panels for the Bordeaux tramway works, commissioned by the CUB; in 2012 a 45 m² work on the façade of the Institut Bergonié; in 2016 the monumental sculpture "Pink Little Rabbit"; and in 2020 the monumental "Merci" hung on the façade of the Palais de la Bourse in tribute to healthcare workers.

In 2023 the Institut Culturel Bernard Magrez devoted "35 Tours" to him, an exhibition of close to 140 works — paintings, drawings, sculptures — covering thirty-five years of production. The same year, working with the City of Bordeaux, he installed eighteen posters in support of the Ukrainian people on the place Gambetta, under the title "Bleu, jaune et liberté".

Zone Trois Galerie presented "So What ?" from 10 April to 7 June 2025. In it the artist changes method: "Doing more with less, degrowth, recycling and sharing are perhaps the watchwords of this new body of work." He now paints over grounds begun by other people — canvases by amateur painters, children’s scribbles, exercises left behind by school work-experience students — in order to "give a chance to work that was condemned to be abandoned, forgotten, thrown away". The character does not disappear: "Toto is still there, alone and in full light on a bare canvas, or by the dozen in the shadows of landscapes and still lifes."

"And so? And so, here are some of the paintings I have made since the solo show at the Institut Culturel Magrez in Bordeaux in 2023, which laid out 35 years of work.

I had to start again, find a second wind, another direction; there were questions, doubts, some withdrawal too, a break, a rupture, a renewal… Give up a character who had been the most faithful of the faithful in everything I made since 1990? But then how do I tell my stories, at once private and universal, with a brush? How do I render the disorder of the world, the anxiety and the dread of a corrosive society that keeps drawing itself on our screens and in real life?

Doing more with less, degrowth, recycling and sharing are perhaps the watchwords of this new body of work… Painting four-handed — not by collaborating with another artist, but by using grounds begun by amateur painters, unfinished pieces or hopeless daubs, children’s scribbles, exercises left by a school student on work experience in my studio… Giving a chance to work condemned to be abandoned, forgotten, thrown away…

SO WHAT? A detour, a diversion, a black line cut around the figure — in that sense nothing changes… Toto is still there, alone and in full light on a bare canvas, or by the dozen in the shadows of landscapes and still lifes…"

Jofo, April 2025