Francis Gengoux

Confirmation of a style

The art, passionately

Sketch for "Lettre à un Gilet Jaune" (2019)

Since 2018, a landscape attracts me especially when it embodies the three spaces of the biosphere: lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. However, nothing would be possible without the presence of the Sun, the source of all life. Thus are gathered the four elements dear to the ancient Greeks: Earth, Water, Air and Fire.

My current style results from a meditation to answer this question: how to get out of a long night in geometric abstraction? By adapting the plastic vocabulary of Letter to a Yellow Vest to the observation of reality, including the landscapes of my immediate environment.

With the theme of landscape, my approach asserts itself rather as an anthropocosmic expressionism enriched by the breadth of the palette and the originality of the touch. I am inspired by existing images to simplify and amplify the essential. By its iconicity (degree of resemblance), photography remains many times prisoner of reality and, consequently, of the appearance of things. When the photo is descriptive, my painting is suggestive. My ambition? To be as close as possible to my inner truth in connection with my original roots and my cognitive baggage.

In addition to painting on the pattern, every season. on foot or by bike, I explore the surroundings to find most often a remarkable subject by its apparent banality, so as to magnify it by the style. I spot the lighting sometimes delayed (thanks to a fiddled compass, which enhances the best the chosen pattern to express a state of mind. I crunch the essential in a notebook, which will have to be developed in the silence of the workshop. Using my digital camera that I also use as a notebook, I take some photos from different angles.

In the workshop, I carefully examine the images on the computer to discover the simple and complex absolute forms, forms with character, impossible to see on the spot. I spin them in my mind like a rare treat. After a severe sorting, I keep the most significant ones. Then comes the composition by association of forms, with the concern not to kill the image.

When all forms agree, the plastic idea is embodied. Thus interpreted, the drawn landscape already reflects my state of mind. At this exciting stage, the composition must meet the requirements of an immutable trilogy: Unity, Variety, Clarity.

For a nude, a portrait or another theme. I also transpose the study on the canvas in the respect of proportions. even if in the process of execution the painting calls forms, surprising colors of life; leaving the door open to improvisation is essential. If they fit into the structure of the composition by serving the plastic idea, I roll out my most beautiful red carpet.

Place! here is the great adventure of intelligence and heart to reach the holy grail of aesthetics: plastic emotion, I said, plastic.

Francis Gengoux.