Galerie Templon Paris Beaubourg: François Rouan: Aftermath

Known for its woven fabrics, Francois Rouan exhibits this time, at the Gallery Temple rue Beaubourg around forty new photographic paintings created since 2020.

For nearly 40 years, Rouan focused on deconstructing the notion of painting, through a new process that would become his trademark: pictorial braiding. However, at the end of the 1980s, he turned to photography, a process that he has tirelessly explored and diverted for 25 years, alongside his work as a painter.

The exhibition displays a series of small format photographic works. The fruit of insatiable experimentation and exploration of an elusive medium, the reworked photos are available around a deliberately stripped-down palette. While restrained, black and white combines from time to time with coral or salmon shades. This apparent chromatic simplicity thus gives pride of place to some of the artist’s metaphysical and obsessive questions: the image of the body and the mystery of the origin of the world. “I am interested in the idea of building a framework that speaks about the female body,” explains François Rouan.

It is a complex and erudite process which dictates the development of these photographs: the staging is guided by his models, the artist then plays with the technique of multiple exposures or photographic braiding which he then covers with hatching, dotted lines, interlacing or even tiny commas. Dynamic, these images oscillate between abstraction and figuration. With singular acuity, Rouan’s works resonate with some of today’s concerns – the relationship to the image, the other side of the surface, the role of art in the recomposition of a fragmented real and mental world. .

Born in 1943 in Montpellier, Francois Rouan lives and works in Laversine (France). Associated from the beginning of his career in the 1960s with the Supports/Surfaces movement without being officially affiliated with it, François Rouan has led a singular trajectory, deconstructing the traditional structure of the painting to open new avenues in the field of painting. contemporary. Following his research on collages, he produced his first weavings in 1965 and expanded his practice from 1980 to other mediums, photographic and filmic.