PEZ

An illustrator's precision

Pez is the working name of Pierre Yves Riveau, a French illustrator and painter born in 1976 in Nantes. He came to art through graffiti and pop culture, worked professionally as an illustrator and graphic designer, and moved gradually into full time practice as an artist. The route matters, because it explains the most striking quality of the work: technical precision. His print publisher describes drawings distinguished by their precision and by the many layers of embedded narrative, and both halves of that description hold. The line is exact and the reading is slow.

Layered narrative

A Pez picture rewards the second and third look rather than the first. Detail accumulates. Small figures, jokes, references and half hidden incidents fill the space around the main subject, so that what looks like a single image turns out to contain a sequence of them. The subject matter ranges across graffiti, pop culture, portraiture and straightforward fine art motifs, and the tone runs from the plainly humorous to the faintly macabre. He works on sketchbook paper, on canvas and on wood, in graphite pencil and acrylic, and the sketchbook aesthetic has become a signature in its own right.

His output is organised into named series, among them Masquerade, the Dream and Nightmare series, Distroy, Muses et Hommes, the Pixel series, Visa and Greenpiece.

Exhibitions

Pez has shown regularly in Paris and internationally. Solo exhibitions include Sweet Life at Hoxton Arches in London in 2018, The Etchy and Sketchy Show at Galerie Joseph in Paris in 2019, The Sketchbook at Cohle Gallery in Paris in 2023 and Premier Degre with Cohle Gallery at Urban Art Fair in Paris in 2024. Group exhibitions have taken him to Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, London, Margate, Bordeaux and Hong Kong, and he has appeared at Miami Art Context, Moniker Art Fair, Urban Art Fair and Art Central.

Editions and market

Most of his public market is in prints. He publishes through Graffiti Prints, and his editions are hand signed and numbered, typically on Somerset paper. Lies, dated 2019 and built around the figure of Pinocchio, is among the better known of them and was issued in a small edition. Green Hands is a large screen print in many colours, also published by Graffiti Prints.

At LLB Auction in Luxembourg the record is short but complete. Both lots offered have sold, one just above its low estimate and one at it. With only two results the record establishes a price level for his prints rather than any trend, and it should be read as a floor rather than a valuation.

A note on the name

At least two established artists work under the name Pez, and catalogues do not always distinguish them. This page concerns the French illustrator from Nantes described above. The other is El Pez, the Barcelona street artist Jose Sabate, whose work is built around a smiling fish character and who has a separate market and a separate publisher relationship. Entries that give only the name Pez, with no first name and no image, should be checked against the artwork itself before any price comparison is drawn between the two.