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Jerome Francois : destination painting

by Philippe Piguet in catalogue: Artotheque exhibition Caen



(…)
If the inspiration comes from cinéma, Jerome Francois’ approach is in return totally devoted to painting. Everything is dedicated to it, everything brings us back to his fundamental questioning and every iconographic excursion in his work leads back to it. Be it a question of screen, focal or mise en abîme, of narration, freeze-frame or abstract composition, we find ourselves face to face with a piece of research whith aims to proclaim the perpetuity of a mode. (...)

(...), Jérôme Francois has one aim only : to render painting onto painting. (...)

Because here we’re dealing with a work which is fully anchored in the field of contemporary art if we consider that it is today founded on the dialectics of the hybrid. Jerome Francois’art is not only hybrid from a simple concepual or factual angle of the image; it is also hybrid with regard to an iconography which could pass for being totally heterogeneous were the act of painting not the prime vector.

(...) Jérôme Francois is not saying anything different when in other respects he writes that it is a “supreme malleable matter”, “its own subject from its most varied angles”. He is doing nothing other than adhering to a post-modernist conception of the act of painting insofar as painting is never put to better use than when it constantly questions itself. It is really only on this condition that it will be in position to surprise the very ones doing it, undoing it or simply looking at it and that it will never leave them unscathed.