Our visual culture is occasionally influenced by underground movements, clandestine influences, and forms that survive and reemerge when we least expect them. The essential qualities of these artistic forms persist and endure despite being taken out of context, not as mere copies or citations, but as transformations where something essential remains while also changing. This aligns with Walter Benjamin's theory of the 'posthumous life' of images that, far from disappearing, enter a state of latency before reincarnating in radically new contexts¹. It's then that we need to view things differently to catch these 'survivals' and experience a richer and deeper understanding of the images surrounding us.
Maybe, just maybe, there's a bit of François Truffaut in Intermarché.
In François Truffaut's work, childhood is a favored territory. From Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) to L’argent de poche (1976), passing through L’enfant sauvage (1970), the filmmaker continually explored this space where the rawest, most sincere, and immediate emotions confront themselves, often out of sync with the adult world. Adults are frequently kept at a distance or appear as distant presences, sometimes kind, sometimes threatening, but always secondary compared to the autonomous microsociety of children and teenagers.
With the same insightful gaze and regard, Rudi Rosenberg explored the uncharted territory of adolescence in his film Le Nouveau (2015). The feature film, which can be seen as a beautiful synthesis between La Boum and L’argent de poche, bears the imprint of Truffaut’s cinema and shares with it a way of filming adolescence with sharpness, intensity, and tenderness, observing the world at eye level with its characters and believing this perspective reveals truths inaccessible to adults.
The influence of François Truffaut is evident, in my opinion, when Rudi Rosenberg ventures into advertising. His films retain the same quality of focus, capturing the truth of bodies, their vulnerability, their awkwardness, and those seemingly mundane moments where the core plays out (at Intermarché for Romance and Acadomia for Rosa Paris). Like Truffaut before him, Rosenberg excels at capturing those moments of truth where childhood and adolescence reveal themselves, often despite their intentions. It’s this patience in observation, this belief in the power of silences and feelings, and this candor that deeply characterize Truffaut's approach that Rosenberg has absorbed.
This connection has probably never been theorized, and yet it operates on an unconscious level. For me, Truffaut appears in these advertisements not as a citation or reference but as a spectral presence that quietly enriches our visual daily life.
Lacoste or the art of applied clear line.
Another example of the unconscious porosity of imaginations is also at work in the visual universe of Lacoste, and the echo that can be detected with the graphic approach of the clear line artisans (klare lijn in its original version) has been present for many years.
Clear line is primarily a quest for absolute clarity. This graphic approach, theorized by Joost Swarte based on Hergé’s work, is defined by a radical economy of means of expression: clear outlines, limited shadows, and uniformly applied colors. This aesthetic of reduction is not an impoverishment but a genuine graphic quest for the essence of the essential.
It is no coincidence that Lacoste’s visual expression territory resonates deeply with these principles². The chromatic palette used in the brand’s communications reveals a true kinship with the world of clear line, from Hergé to Floc’h, Yves Chaland to Ted Benoit. In its campaigns, Lacoste favors bold but never garish colors, bright yet softened, often used in even flats without complex gradients. This approach to color as a structuring element demonstrates a shared conception of visual clarity, where color defines and organizes space rather than decorating or complicating it.
The iconographic world of Lacoste also cultivates this precision of human outlines characteristic of the clear line, with spaces where the models' silhouettes stand out precisely but without rigidity, directly evoking the treatment of characters in the clear line³. Thus, postures achieve this paradoxical complexity of purity, where every gesture seems both perfectly natural and subtly choreographed, spontaneous while being meticulously drawn in some and photographed in others.
This shared pursuit of sophistication through simplification is a profound connection between these two worlds. Lacoste's expression territory and the clear line share the conviction that true elegance arises from a process of reduction rather than accumulation. They embody a certain idea of European elegance, this balance that rejects both baroque overload and minimalist austerity.
It seems then that this convergence has developed organically, as if the visual universe of the brand found its natural expression in the grammar of the clear line. This unconscious dimension precisely makes the underlying connection interesting because it does not stem from a calculated strategy but an elective affinity between two visions that unknowingly share the same conception of clarity as the foundation of elegance, where style and stylization blend.
A culture of intimate and collective resonances.
These unexpected convergences reveal the porosity of our visual universe, where our iconographic environment operates through echoes and reverberations. This familiarity exposes a powerful emotional mechanism that transforms encountering a brand into reconnecting with oneself, generating a communion where neither the creative nor the 'viewer' fully understand what is happening, and perhaps that is where the extra soul lies that sets some brands apart—not in a strategy of appropriation but in this ability to become, unknowingly, the receptacle of our own intimate resonances.
There could be many examples of these circulations as they don't stem from direct citation or explicit homage but work on a deeper, more intimate level, subjectively, like echoes that retain something of their source while transforming it.
These invisible circulations testify to the vitality of an imagined world continually reinventing itself, where the most lively part of our visual environment lies in its capacity to create unforeseen dialogues that transform collective persistence into deeply personal experiences. This peculiar alchemy is undoubtedly one of the most subtle and effective drivers of brand allegiance.
¹ Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Payot & Rivages, 2013.
² By a stroke of fate, a nearly identical crocodile to the brand’s emblematic logo appears on page 12, panel 7 of Tintin in the Congo by Hergé at Casterman, though the numbering may vary by edition.
³ The iconography of the 2023 campaign Les rencontres impossibles by Ronan Gallagher or the recent Play Big campaign (BETC agency) further explores, in their own ways, the path of the clear line that has been evolving for years.
