MICHEL FRANÇOIS – FEUILLES, FLAQUES, ANNEAUX ET SÉDIMENTS
2024-04-01Is Michel François inviting us to an unnatural springtime of his own composition? And what different possible postures are we to discern as being at play in this season contre nature—adhering to it, counteracting its self-evidence with our gaze, making guesses at what it doesn’t say, overlaying it with artifice, delving into its sources… This question will be cleared up across several stages and places, all brought together here: “Feuilles, flaques, anneaux et sédiments” [Leaves, puddles, rings, and sediments].
These four series together play upon the strings of the subtle relationships humans maintain with the world. The coming and going of life in matter structures our everyday experience. It is enough to imagine the transformations undergone by fossilized bodies contained in plastic or having reverted to their primordial, calcareous state. The same is true of what happens to resin when it has burst from the tree bark, of paper, or of the skeletons (shells are one kind of skeleton) that bodies engender on their way to mineral solitude. And why not even of our own internal combustions and saline secretions. Such transformations are essential to us and often imperceptible. At the bottom of it all lies the embracing hold of human desire, which endlessly brings to light trajectories ultimately bound for the elements.
Opposite – Foot (tbc), 2023
Exhibition runs through to June 1st, 2024
Mennour
5, rue du Pont de Lodi
75006 Paris
France
