French artist François Ristori (1936–2015) is a lesser-known but representative figure of European postwar abstraction, having shared the same artistic milieu as
Daniel Buren, André Cadere,
Olivier Mosset,
Claude Rutault, and
Niele Toroni. After a period of gestural experimentation in the 1960s, he began to explore the manifold possibilities of the "Trace-Forme" ("Form–Mark"), the conceptual and visual device he created in the late 1960s in tune with contemporary investigations of painting by his fellow artists. From the early 1970s onwards he dedicated his practice to the "Trace-Forme," which was also a way to renew the painterly process at a time when the future of painting was widely debated on the French art scene. Combining blue, red, and white hexagon-like shapes as his preferred and only motif, he employed a systematic process in painting, drawing, and public interventions, at different scales, sometimes in singular works, but also in polyptychs that play with the walls and the work's surroundings.
