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.