Piazza dei Martiri 58, 80121, Naples, Italy
Open: Mon-Sat 10am-7pm
Artist: Michel François
Alfonso Artiaco presents Michel François’ third solo show at the gallery.
Sculpture is the underlying principle of François’ practice, informing his work across photography, video, installation and performance. His research centres on matter, space and the relations that emerge between forms, volumes and surfaces. Working with a wide range of materials, everyday objects and images, François subtly shifts the terms of ordinary reality, disrupting its established balances and bringing new perceptual possibilities into view.
His forms emerge through processes of transformation, accumulation, compression and dispersal, held in a continual tension between order and instability, presence and absence, fullness and void. Matter, subject to physical forces and perceptual shifts, becomes the ground on which these dynamics unfold, giving rise to configurations that resist fixed interpretation. While his work moves freely across materials and languages, a recurrent set of relations and underlying dynamics runs through the practice, without ever settling into a singular style.
Experience, in its physical, affective and everyday dimensions, also runs through François’ work. Memories, situations and references to the world around us are not developed into explicit narratives, but become embedded in the very structure of his forms. A subtle shift in the arrangement or relation of familiar elements can unsettle their ordinary logic, allowing the familiar to take on an unexpected character – at once recognisable and slightly estranged. Sculpture becomes a space in which matter and thought converge, and perception unfolds through an ongoing process of association and reconfiguration.
Michel François was born in Saint-Trond, Belgium, in 1956. He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
A conceptual artist and sculptor, Michel François works across sculpture, video, photography, prints, painting and installation, transforming everyday objects, materials and traces of past events into carriers of meaning. His practice unfolds through shifting connections between works and exhibitions, exploring cause and effect and the potential of minimal gestures to alter the state of an object and generate unexpected consequences. Often assembled through formal and conceptual affinities, his sculptures, images and drawings evoke processes of emergence and disappearance, in which matter seems to expand and contract upon itself.
The artist’s institutional exhibitions include La Plante en nous, Haus der Kunst, Munich and Kunsthalle Bern (2000); Salon Intermédiaire, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2002); Plans d’évasion, SMAK, Ghent and IAC, Villeurbanne (2009–2010); Nineteen thousand posters. 1994–2016, MAC’s Grand-Hornu (2011) and Frac Île-de-France (2016); Pièce à conviction, Middelheim Museum, Antwerp (2016); Panopticon, YARAT Contemporary Art Centre, Baku (2022); Contre Nature, Bozar, Brussels (2023); and Toucher l’insensé, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2024). His major international participations include Documenta IX, Kassel (1992), the São Paulo Biennial (1994) and the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), where he represented Belgium alongside Ann Veronica Janssens.
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