Born in 1934 in Uccle, near Brussels, Folon became interested in drawing at a very young age. In 1960 he abandoned his university course in architecture and moved to Paris, determined to earn a living through his drawings. Unfortunately the reception Folon received in Paris was not as warm as the artist had hoped; his drawings were considered too naïve and simple by art galleries there. Hoping for greater success overseas, he sent a number of drawings to American magazines like Horizon, Esquire, The New Yorker and Time who published them without hesitation. Art directors and editors were immediately captured by Folon’s symbolic designs, so different to the overly realistic style which was dominant at the time. This rapid success led to the artist having his first solo exhibition at the Lefebre Gallery in New York in 1969.  

In the early 1970s, Folon met the writer and art director Giorgio Soavi, who was working for the magazine Comunita’ published by Olivetti, the Italian typewriter manufacturer. Soavi was to become Folon’s greatest patron and their collaboration produced many books, including "Letters to Giorgio", and in 1979 "The Martian Chronicles" by the writer Ray Bradbury, which Folon illustrated to significant acclaim.
 "Some have intimated that he is merely an illustrator," Ray Bradbury, reported: "Merely! As if illustration were mere! But he is more than that. Folon is interior; his ideas bounce off the insides of his own head. Being so trapped, they are inspirations rather than illustrations."

In fact the power of his images also resulted in commissions for monumental murals; in 1968, he decorated the French pavilion at the Milan Triennale and over the next few years he created a number of huge figurative works, visions of cities and landscapes, amongst which were murals for the metro in Brussels and for Waterloo station in London.  Folon’s humanitarian sympathies were fundamental to his work and he designed eloquent campaining posters for Greenpeace, Amnesty International and Unicef.  For the 40th anniversary of the United Nations, in 1988, he was commissioned by Amnesty International to design an illustrated edition of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

From the early 1990s he began to spend long periods of time in Italy, creating large sculptures of some of his favourite themes and in particular of his famous character Everyman. Many of these were exhibited in 2005 in a large retrospective exhibition held in the Forte Belvedere in Florence.  In 2000 he had inaugurated the Fondation Folon, a building in a park near Brussels, the fifteen rooms of which were designed by the artist and where more than 300 of his works are permanently on display.  

An example of Folon’s remarkable watercolour technique, this sheet demonstrates the sureness of his hand; the curtains with their ragged edges float away from the window; the space of the box like room is clearly defined and shaded with extraordinary subtlety. As often in Folon’s work, the meaning of the vision is not spelt out; the radiant sunset is made faintly disturbing by the proximity of the water and the emptiness of the cell like room.