PARIS.- Born in Sint-Truiden (Belgium) in 1956, Michel François lives and works in Brussels. Since the 1980s, he has developed a body of work in which sculpture serves as a structuring practice, inspiring photography, video, art installations, performance, curatorial projects, and, more recently, painting. This freedom in the choice of medium is matched by a rigorous reflection on space, matter, volume, and the conditions under which forms appear and disappear.
Far from being considered solely as an autonomous entity, the artwork is conceived here as part of a network of relations. Embedded in a system of resemblances and analogies, the works refer to one another and, together, engage with the space of representation. The exhibition thus becomes a site of interdependencies where the works and their environment give rise to unstable configurations.
What might, at first glance, appear to be a dispersed collection in fact follows an organic, plural, and rhizomatic logic. The artist favours processes of arrangement and disarrangement through which works of art escape any attempt at categorisation. As seen in his Scribbles or Enroulements, forms emerge from gestures that are at times uncontrolled, proliferating, evolving in intermediate states — between compressed and scattered, whole and undone, presence and absence.
Through these dynamics, Michel François explores a form of entropy: the dispersion of elements, the complexity of relations, and the slow degradation of materials. The works seem to be subject to a process of wear and tear in which time acts as an agent of transformation: erasure becomes an active modality of form. Even in their titles, the Peintures d’usure or Rotopaintings bear witness to this modus operandi. This principle recurs in the constantly renewed use of these elements, giving rise to works that are replayed, reactivated, and reconfigured according to context, within an open, ever-evolving structure.
‘Traditionally, sculpture is either about adding matter or removing matter […]. In my case, it’s true that I have always been more interested in things that have been removed […]. I have always thought of the practice of sculpture as an activity that retraces an activity that has already taken place, like a trace — something that remains after the sculptor has withdrawn and left behind things that could make sculpture.’*
In this interval between the infinitely large and the infinitely small, his works often arise from a seemingly insignificant event — an ‘everyday miracle’ (such as a bar of soap or a hole in a wall) — which, with a degree of openness and imagination, comes to reconfigure our perception of the world. It engages the artist, to whom it appeared, as much as it engages us, calling for an experience that is at once sensory, situated, and universal.
By expanding the possibilities of space and thought, Michel François’s work traces an ode to escape — a way of withdrawing from constrained systems, of introducing playfulness into established structures. Nature, time, and their effects appear here as forces that put physical bodies and certainties to the test, exposing them to their own limits.
Ida Simon-Raynaud
