Programming 2009-2010
2009-2010
From march 4th to April 10th, 2010 Salle 1
François Simard
L’autre bord de la montagne
François Simard's paintings, which are created using a grammar based on pictorial and chromatic tension points, open a space for dialogue. This dialogue is presented on a dual level, which involves the internal register of each painting and the external frame, understood as the site where the links between the various components of the series are forged. Beginning with a triggering principle, an initial idea — to paint a landscape, an architectural representation — the artist sets out to deconstruct the very thing he imposed upon himself as an apriori limitation. This play of ruptures takes place through the integration of various graphic objects, ranging from hard edge tracings to stretches of bright and intertwined colour fields, which blur the preliminary propositions.

More recently, new figurative elements have made their apparition in Simard's

work, including a drawing practice introduced by way of primary and partial motifs, notably representing construction materials. Though these elements revive the tension of the initial pretext with which the artist begins each painting, it is the line's free flow and its multiple combinatory possibilities that dominate here. The four large-scale paintings on display are structured around a common vocabulary, but function as autonomous entities, with each one providing a different answer to the question of representation. This question-apparently the starting point of any figurative practice-remains altogether valid when the proposed treatment offers a refined extension of it. Through the dislocation of architectural or landscape perspectives Simard's anonymous and abstract environments set out to demonstrate that the question's answer is to be found in its reiteration, yet without wallowing in tautology.
A.S.