#90

 

Étienne François
Natures fragmentées
solo show at the Studio
09/11 – 20/12/2025
Opning Sunday 09/11, 3 pm - 7 pm

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For his first exhibition at the 22.48 m2 gallery, Étienne François takes over the Studio with a selection of recent paintings, brought together under the title Natures fragmentées (Fragmented Natures).
Through this corpus, the artist continues his exploration of the forms and images that haunt the history of painting. While he readily borrows from the genre's tradition, Étienne François shifts its codes to reveal its contemporary vitality. His works are born from memories, visual notes, fragments of images internalized and then reinvented. Nothing is directly quoted: everything is filtered, recomposed, moved. The pattern then becomes a field of experimentation where the artist questions the persistence of forms and the memory of the gaze.

In these compositions, where objects, plants, architectural fragments, and flashes of light intermingle, reality seems to waver. Temporal landmarks become blurred, spaces bend, colors explode—from soft green to bright pink, passing through acid tones that defy nostalgia. The painting becomes both observation and adrift, as if the time of the painting contained several moments at once: that of memory, of gesture, and of matter.

For Étienne François, the painting does not seek the perfection of a fixed image, but the trace of a process. We perceive the hesitations, the retouches, the repentances that feed into the final image—all signs of a gaze in motion. In this oscillation between memory and invention, the artist restores an almost metaphysical tension to the genre of still life: that of a world where everything persists for an instant before fading away.

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PRESS RELEASE