François Rouan - Après-coup 1998-2024

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.