François Rouan
Odalisques et Pavanes 2009-2020
At the age of 80, painter François Rouan is returning to Galerie Templon almost two decades after his last show with a brand new exhibition of recent work.
At the start of his career in the 1960s François Rouan was linked with the Supports/Surfaces movement without officially associating himself with it. Since then he has trodden a unique path, deconstructing the traditional structure of the picture to open up new avenues in contemporary painting.
Complex and erudite, his new paintings stay true to thirty years of experimentation and artistic engagement, a “political utopia with a humanist dimension.”
His ambiguous figures and iconographic references are ornamented with motifs evoking the abstract fragments that characterise the artist’s core method: braiding. Alternating between relishing the joys of form and colour and posing metaphysical questions, his work resonates particularly strongly with current concerns: our relationship with images, the reverse side of the surface, the capacity painting possesses to reconstruct a fragmental real and mental world.
Sardane
The artist
Born in 1943 in Montpellier, François Rouan lives and works in Laversine (France). From the beginning of his career in the 1960s, he was associated with the Supports/Surfaces movement without being officially affiliated with it. François Rouan has followed a singular path, deconstructing the traditional structure of the painting to open up new avenues in the field of contemporary painting. Following his research into collages, he produced his first braids in 1965 and from 1980 onwards extended his practice to other mediums, photographic and filmic.
