Michel François

Michel François employs different types of media and techniques in conjunction, including installation, video, sculpture and photography, to express his refined and idiosyncratic view of reality. In general, you could say he makes inventories of the world around us by way of antithesis. François is creating spaces of reflection or of self-awareness, by showing normal human occurrences as well as recognisable processes and objects. Yet at the same time he reverses things, or rather, turns them inside out. Some inversions are formal such as convex and concave, empty and full, light and dark. But others speak more to social structures such as freedom and imprisonment, riches and poverty, work and leisure, survival and play. The standard measure of all his works is based on essential questions about man: what he experiences in the world, how he senses the world and how these sensations are related to his way of thinking and perceiving.

In his work, Michel François is concerned with all things separately and collectively. The same is true for his exhibitions. One image or sculpture refers to another which in its turn will allude to the reality outside the exhibition space. What seems to be a chaos at first sight is in fact a different kind of logic, one based on divergence, change and multiple possibilities, similar to the ramifications of a cactus, the pattern of an octopus. For this reason, the exhibition is almost like a living organism to François. His exhibitions do not only consist of a number of tangible objects, but also to a large extent of contamination, a continuous interaction between the individual, the objects, the architecture, the networks and nature. In his own words: “L’art, de toute façon, c’est la vie que l’on sculpte”.