Mot Nu Mental — François Dufrêne — Galerie G-P & N Vallois — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 16 → April 21, 2018

The gallery Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois present in both its spaces the work of Julien Berthier, Martin Kersels and an installation of François Dufrêne.

Dufrêne was a poet, resolutely a poet. Anyone who knew him remembers a formidable onstage presence, with his famous Scream-rhythms, oral performances with dislocated semantics. He became a plastic artist after meeting, and then being mentored by, Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, which allowed him to further explore his letterist experiments by becoming a “poster artist”. But Dufrêne exhibited his posters stuck on backwards, calling them Dos, Dessous or Envers (back, underside, behind). This subterfuge gave a unique patina to his canvases, reversing the meaning and the readings of the words on the posters, in the form, as he put it himself, of “rearranged scraps”. A concrete and upside-down poetry.