“Kukweaq 2” by Tyler Stout.

When I was in my mid-teens I visited Paris with my family. I remember only two things clearly from our short trip. One: The Parisians were ruthlessly unforgiving with my mediocre third-year high school French. And two: There was this giant old metal building with an enormous open space inside, with a relatively narrow walk that went all the way around up top, looking down over a huge unused expanse below. The upper level had a poster exhibit. Like many kids with a limited budget and artistic pretensions, I had lots of posters on the walls of my room. The usual suspects: Dalí­, Escher, Magritte. None of the exotic works, just the regular ones you can still find at a typical middle-American mall with upscale pretensions. Friendly posterized art by the great illustrators.

The small exhibit of poster art in that giant Parisian enorma-dome absolutely blew my mind. There were rock-concert posters of course, but also Eastern-European propaganda, advertisements in languages I couldn’t place, exotic color mixes, unusual line strokes, bizarre typography, and extreme images, unlike anything I’d seen before. Great poster artists are also great craftsmen, carefully constructing their illustrations within fixed limitations and color pallet to make us smile, laugh, think, or act. I could have spent two days up there, staring slack-jawed with wonder.