Recorda was published on the occasion of François Rouan’s first solo show in TEMPLON New York space. This retrospective features about thirty works created between 1969 and 2024 bearing witness to the artist’s insatiable passion for working with the surface.
“François Rouan’s work opts always Sarah Wilson for complexity: a visual jazz. Modernist colour and cuttings, structuralist weavings, iconographical penetrations, Lacanian figures, games between spaces, memories and layers of time work contrapuntally together.” – Sarah Wilson
“Cutting the surface into strips, combining two paintings by weaving them together, was part of this iconoclastic approach, marking a desire to question the painting, but also to construct another space in the depth of the superimpositions of interweavings/collages.” – Alfred Pacquement
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.
