French artist François Rouan, known for his braided canvases, presents for his latest exhibition at Galerie Templon is latest “photographic-tableaux”, a group of forty previously unseen pieces created since 2020.
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.
The new exhibition features a series of small format photographic artworks. 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. “I’m interested in the idea of building a framework that refers to the female body,” explains François Rouan.
Creating these photographic pieces is a complex, tedious process: he lets his models guide the staging phase before playing with techniques such as multiple exposures and photographic braiding, which he then covers with hatching, dots, tracery or tiny commas. 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.
Born in 1943 in Montpellier, François Rouan lives and works in Laversine (France). From the beginning of his career in the 1960s, he was associated with the Supports/Surfaces movement without being officially affiliated with it. François Rouan has followed a singular path, deconstructing the traditional structure of the painting to open up new avenues in the field of contemporary painting. Following his research into collages, he produced his first braids in 1965 and from 1980 onwards extended his practice to other mediums, photographic and filmic.
The exhibition will be marked by the publication of catalogue in May 2024 featuring a text by Agnès Fabre.
François Rouan : Après-coups
from April 30 to July 13, 2024
Galerie Templon Paris Beaubourg
30 rue Beaubourg
75003 Paris
www.templon.com
Tuesday – Saturday, 10 a.m. – 7 p.m.
