Known for his braided canvases, French artist François Rouan presents his latest "photographic-tableaux", a group of forty previously unseen pieces.
Rouan has been spending over 40 years working on deconstructing the notion of the painting using a new process which became his signature: pictorial braiding. In the late 1980s, he started using photography, a medium he has constantly explored and subverted for the last 25 years alongside his work as a painter. Fruit of his inexhaustible impulse to experiment and delve into the elusive medium of photography, these reworked images centre on a resolutely pared-back palette. The understated black and white landscape occasionally embraces hints of coral or salmon. The apparent simplicity of the colour range opens the door wide to some of the metaphysical questions that obsesses the artist: the body and the mystery of the world's origins. The result is dynamic image, swinging between abstraction and figuration. Rouan's works are strikingly perceptive, resonating with current concerns such as our relationship to images, the other side of the surface, and the role of art in reconstructing a fragmented material and mental world.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Galerie Templon, Paris, in 2024.
Born in Montpellier, France, in 1943, François Rouan moved to Paris in 1961 to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts. His research into collages led to his first experiments with braiding in 1965, initially with gouache-covered paper than painted canvases, cut up then reassembled as a grid. His focus shifted to other techniques, including hatching and wax. In 1980 he broadened his practice to encompass other mediums, both photographic and film-based.
His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and retrospectives, notably at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1975, 1983 and 1994), Musée d'Art Moderne in Villeneuve-d'Ascq (1995), Abattoirs in Toulouse (2006) and Musée Fabre in Montpellier (2017). He has been exhibited worldwide, including by the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York (1972), Stadtische Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf (1979), Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo (1997) and Beijing Institute of Fine Arts (2000). Between 1987 and 2005, François Rouan's work featured in a dozen exhibitions at Galerie Templon. In September 2024, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon is holding a major retrospective of his work.
