[Post Title] - McGAVIN GALLERY Articles

There are some buildings you live in.

And then there are buildings that quietly stare back at you.

Four-Leaf Towers, Houston (1983) by Jean-Michel Folon

The Four-Leaf Towers in Houston belong firmly in the latter category. Twin monoliths. Calm. Unbothered. Slightly aloof. The sort of buildings that don’t need to shout because they already know exactly what they are. Designed by renowned modernist architect César Pelli and completed in 1982, Houston’s Four-Leaf Towers are a landmark of late-20th-century residential architecture, instantly recognizable for their twin forms and distinctive coloring. The Four-Leaf Towers are known locally as the “Lipstick Towers,” and have come to be a part of defining the skyline of Uptown Houston—projecting prominence from afar while offering a distinctly quiet, inward sense of luxury to those who live between Tanglewood and River Oaks, two of Houston's most desirable and affluent neighborhoods.

In 1983, Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon saw them the same way—and distilled them into a poster that feels less like architecture and more like a pause in thought. Commissioned in 1983, Jean-Michel Folon’s poster served as an advertising image for the Four-Leaf Towers, promoting the development to its earliest residents with a distinctly poetic and mysterious style.

Printed as a promotional poster for the Four-Leaf Towers in Houston, Texas, the poster was published by Sessions Editions USA and printed in USA by Dave Hanson in March 1983.This is that poster.

At first glance, it’s deceptively simple: two floating towers, a lone figure below, a muted horizon that could be dusk or dawn or something altogether internal. But Folon was never interested in literal depictions. His work lives in the space between observation and introspection—where things aren’t quite real, but deeply recognizable.

That tension is the point.

Folon emerged from the post-war European surrealist tradition, but he never embraced the bombast of Dalí or the theatrical weirdness of Magritte.

Instead, he perfected a quieter surrealism, one built on absence, stillness, and restraint. His figures are often solitary. His cities are often empty. His skies feel vast, not because they are dramatic, but because they are unresolved.

In the Four-Leaf Towers poster, the buildings float—not physically, but emotionally. They’re present without being grounded. Monumental, yet strangely gentle. The small human figure below doesn’t dominate the scene, nor is he dwarfed by it. He simply stands there, hands in pockets perhaps, doing the most radical thing modern life rarely allows: nothing.

That’s Folon’s genius. He makes stillness feel active.

And here’s where the story takes a turn that even Folon might have appreciated; I live in these towers.

Not metaphorically, not sentimentally, literally. With my wife and our Great Dane Domino, I wake up inside the subject of this poster. I first saw Folon's Four-Leaf Tower poster at a dinner party framed inside a neighbors apartment. And I obsessed over it, even making them an offer to buy it; but they declined. Like most good art, the right opportunity didn’t reveal itself immediately. It waited. Over time, the connection became unavoidable, and curiosity took over. I searched every corner of Google, eBay, Craigslist, and OfferUp, until eventually on New Years Day 2025 I found the original printer who produced these posters in 1983—forty two years ago, with ink, paper, and advertising intention.

Remarkably, he still had remaining original stock. And I purchased all of it.

These aren't reproductions chasing nostalgia. They are period prints, objects that have survived quietly while the world sped past them. The paper without wear. The color as rich as the day the printer pulled them from the press. The image has patience. Everything about it resists modern urgency, which is precisely why it feels so relevant now.

Folon’s work endures because it doesn’t tell you what to think. It gives you space to stand, like the figure in the poster, and decide for yourself. In an era of maximalism, noise, and relentless opinion, that’s not just refreshing, it’s radical.

Some art demands your attention. Folon’s art earns it; slowly, confidently, and without raising its voice.

And once you notice it, you tend not to forget it.

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Jean-Michel Folon and the Art of Standing Still