Jamais seul
Patrick Javault is welcoming Michel François.
For thirty years now, Michel François has been building up an adventurous and exuberant work that includes posters, objects of thought, and ample, overflowing installations. Last year an important retrospective, « Plans d’évasion » [« Escape plans »], took place in two institutions: SMAK in Gand and IAC in Villeurbanne. A conceptual artist, François can also use his arms and create a painting out of a sheet of crumpled paper as well as arrange an incredible number of images and things to visualize lines of thought or explain the way the artistic-social machinery operates.
A Michel François exhibition always produces the feeling of stepping into a studio, of entering the artist’s mind with the sounds of the street remaining audible. Whether reflecting on form, letting a material’s qualities guide the work, grappling with social issues or intimate concerns, François always proceeds through a direct approach made of intuitions and dazzling brilliance. For long, imprisonment and the form of spaces tied to constraint – administrations, for instance – provided him with avenues for investigation and were the opportunity for exchanges and collaborative works with inmates.
The political naturally has its place in this work, as do the vegetal, the mineral or the animal. In « Bureau augmenté, » for instance, the money supply kept growing under the table, next to files and computers, a great way to figure work; and in « Salon intermédiaire, » videos by the artist could be watched while washing hands with a giant rotating soap, an amusing way to rethink participation. An ongoing thought on the form assumed by exhibitions complements the production of pieces. Michel François has produced collaborative works, but he has also organized exhibitions, even inviting curators to produce works themselves with « Faux jumeaux » [« Fraternal Twins »]. With art critic and independent curator Hélène Meisel, we will try and find our way in this exceptionally rich work.
