Michel François — À propos — Slash Paris

Michel François’ work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions: at the IAC of Villeurbanne, at the Smak of Ghent, at the MACBA and at the Joan Miro Foundation in Barcelona, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, at the Mamco of Geneva, at the Gulbenkian Museum of Lisbon, at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, at the Kunsthalle of Bern, at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, at the Witte De With in Rotterdam, at the Centre for fine Arts in Brussels, at the Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg; and also in different Biennales such as the Istanbul Biennale, the Documenta IX of Kassel, and the Venice Biennale.

“So, yes, some sculpture, but which could be defined as conceptual, or more or less ideal, in its material substance. Metaphorical sculptures with a general blurring of meanings and reason in gratuitous expenditure, contemporary consumption and dispersal. An opportunity, also, to approach notions such as that of contamination, destructive energy, transformation, claustrophobia, confinement, order and chaos, entropy. What has always struck me with you is the way in which each form is irrigated by a network of references, by intimate and universal narratives, yet it remains deliberately underground, nondiscursive and indeterminate; recurrent, obsessive motifs, the result of travel, meetings, reading, reflections and other personal experiences — in short, of an insatiable curiosity for the world. Invisible, but appreciable. All these hybrid images and heterogeneous forces that you bring together and crystallise, as if you wished to embrace, with love and determination, the whole world, and — in the same movement — desire and violence, distance and emotion, beauty and cruelty.”