Rouan has been spending over 40 years working on deconstructing the notion of the painting using a new process which became his signature: pictorial braiding. In the late 1980s, he started using photography, a medium he has constantly explored and subverted for the last 25 years alongside his work as a painter.

The new exhibition features a series of small format photographic artworks. Fruit of his inexhaustible impulse to experiment and delve into the elusive medium of photography, these reworked images centre on a resolutely pared-back palette. The understated black and white landscape occasionally embraces hints of coral or salmon. The apparent simplicity of the colour range opens the door wide to some of the metaphysical questions that obsesses the artist: the body and the mystery of the world’s origins. “I’m interested in the idea of building a framework that refers to the female body,” explains François Rouan.

Creating these photographic pieces is a complex, tedious process: he lets his models guide the staging phase before playing with techniques such as multiple exposures and photographic braiding, which he then covers with hatching, dots, tracery or tiny commas. The result is dynamic image, swinging between abstraction and figuration. Rouan’s works are strikingly perceptive, resonating with current concerns such as our relationship to images, the other side of the surface, and the role of art in reconstructing a fragmented material and mental world.

The exhibition will be marked by the publication of catalogue in May 2024 featuring a text by Agnès Fabre.