Text by Rosario Caltabiano, 22.48 m2' Director

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For his first exhibition at 22.48 m2, 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.​

 

 

Extract from Carine Klonowski's text for the exhibition Atlantis, is calling at Julio.

 

A temporal disruption is at work, and our perception of the landscape is overturned in Étienne François' paintings. If, for a brief moment, we saw mythological scenes, then Hubert Robert must have been on acid. Forms are diluted, architecture, nature, and artifacts blend together in a palette ranging from almond green to candy pink, resolutely pop, too vivid to be believed tarnished by time. And while Étienne François reassures us by titling one painting Storm never lasts, the large-format Dare mighty things—which echoes the message hidden under the parachute of the Perseverance rover sent to Mars by NASA last month—reminds us that man's great conquests are not without consequences, and that nothing is eternal.

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By Magali Lesauvage •for Beaux Arts Magazine on July 15, 2017

https://www.beauxarts.com/expos/jeune-creation-2017-5-noms-a-retenir/

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Étienne François: fresh painting

It's complicated to be a painter in 2017. Étienne François, born in 1984, does not seem to have set himself the goal of reinventing the medium, and this relative modesty is rather refreshing. With broad brushstrokes that iridescently depict raging waves or hollow out chasms, his canvases revive, in a way, the Romantic interest in fiery nature, while his silent portraits have the density of statues. Étienne François has been awarded the La Richardière (Lhomme) prize, where he will be welcomed as artist-in-residence.

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Text by Sarah Chabrier for Jeune Création

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Paint, wait, cover, erase, rush, postpone, and start again.

Sometimes time disappears, the image is there, water flows, a torrent gushes forth, a rock heated by the sun, icy water, leaves moistened by mist or moonlight on a forest.

Sensory bridges are woven between the paintings, series are formed. The landscape is no longer really a landscape, these are no longer images on images but an elusive environment. The absence of human presence removes any fictional link, the image can become a motif. It is no longer a snapshot of a landscape but an autonomous image.

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