FKDL, “Figures of Style”, September 5 – October 4, 2025

French street artist and studio artist Franck Duval, better known as FKDL, has always approached the street with a different set of tools. Where most writers leaned on spray paint and stencils, he built images out of fragments—magazine clippings, advertising spreads, press photos—that carried the ghosts of another time. He collects, trims, and reassembles, distilling hours of scavenging into figures that shimmer with nostalgia and aspiration. These are stories you may recognize, yet they arrive altered, re-framed, and suddenly more mysterious. Stumbled upon in the street, they create a fleeting jolt of recognition; encountered in the gallery, they unfold into enveloping icons, polished until they appear almost too pristine to be real.

In his new exhibition Figures of Style at Galerie Taglialatella (September 5 – October 4, Paris), FKDL sharpens his vocabulary again. This time, the discarded pages of books—the blanks, the forgotten openings and endings—become fertile ground for his heroines. Onto these silent surfaces, he layers the saturated clippings of his archive, introducing simplified backdrops for women who feel both familiar and freshly conjured. They gaze back, figures carrying their own authority, commanding you to meet them on equal terms. Their presence is not quite nostalgic nor decorative: it’s assertive, charged, animated.

The daydream is cinematic and literary. FKDL’s compositions function like visual rhetoric, drawing on metaphor, image, and allegory. A hemline can suggest an entire character; a posture can signal resilience or restraint. He treats the female figure not as a symbol to be consumed but as a protagonist who shapes the narrative. At the same time, he broadens his scope to another love —introducing images of automobiles; dreamlike vessels of freedom and speed, their abstraction hinting at motion and desire rather than horsepower.

What separates FKDL from the familiar grammar of street art is his re-invention, his devotion to his archive as much as to the wall. His romance with the popular culture of another era elevates it into something aspirational, iconic, and just out of reach. By trusting the image to lead, FKDL creates art that sits between collective memory and personal imagination. The canvases of Figures of Style carry that duality: clean, singular, and mysterious—icons that seem to step forward from silence, asking to be remembered.

Galerie Taglialatella

FKDL

« Figures of Style »

September 05 to October 04

2 Pl. Farhat Hached, 75013 Paris