Artist: Francis Marshall

Francis Marshall’s magic skylights
For Didier Mouchel and Dominique Polad-Hardouin

One enters Francis Marshall’s world as if at the threshold of a total labyrinthine realm. And it’s not so much the bustling profusion that reigns supreme here as it is the dead ends, false starts, back doors, and winding tunnels that unfold within it. If you looked for an expression, a meaning, you’d find a wealth of them, a multitude!...

In so doing, amidst this seeming mayhem, Francis Marshall reminds us that artwork is a sentry against a world on the brink of collapse. This is expressed, in their own way, by his almost abandoned railcars, his hotels made of superimposed crates where couples, embraced and entwined in both senses of the words, huddle so tightly that they seem to be in embryo, or his steles made of salvaged wooden planks that house ex-voto-like paintings in the depths of their cupboards or drawers. There remains, persistently, and particularly in his paintings, something of a muted threat, without our being quite able to locate or characterize it.

Because, for almost fifty years, the artist’s production has been characterized above all by a tenacious will to free himself from all imposed rules and constraints, especially those of beauty, truth, and justice, and even those of time and space. Thus the restlessness that constitutes his work – not unlike that of Camille Bombois or André Bauchant, to name just a few – is merely the singular expression of permanent departures from the well-trodden paths of life and art. So we traverse it via the side roads, we board moving trains, we lodge in makeshift hotels, we experience humanity differently, we see painting differently...

We especially encounter some of the bold, guiding figures, from Mauricette – “Why Mauricette? I think I wanted to tell the story of a little girl and not a boy. The little girl suffers more, the little boy will become a little man, he will enjoy many privileges, whereas the girl really suffers” – to an anonymous, mischievous, vagabond girl in a tartan skirt and white blouse; from the artist’s grandfather, of British origin, to an apprentice photographer, and an elegant but somewhat awkward man in a suit and tie – who could be the artist himself, and who seems just as lost as the rest of us onlookers amidst adventures that surpass him/us...

For, beyond a disorderly and multiform savagery – “We’re all padded,” says the artist, who titles some of his sculptures Bourrage (Padding/Stuffing) – each figure has its own existence and its own voice, even if these confuse and upset us; each thing has an immediate necessity within the whole; each element has a precise role to play and to foil, even in relation to the artist himself! The artist thus takes care to precisely title his work, to describe the characters, to define the places and spaces, even to begin quasi-filmic narratives as if to better imbue them with meaning and fit them into the reality of the world as one enters the mold of social existence before transcending it: “There was a desire, on the objects in particular, to disrupt them. I loved writing anyway, and at first I was fascinated by the signs prohibiting things in the countryside; even the advertisements... And the strength of writing struck me. That’s why I started doing it. [...] I didn’t feel at all like a writer, but I wanted the words to be part of this story.”

It is said that artists were granted a role once the burning of witches and heretics began. Suffice it to say that the latter’s reconquered freedom of expression was won on the mute ashes of the former. Confronted with what Francis Marshall today proposes, there is something excessive, foolhardy, unbearable, unjust, unjustified, and unjustifiable, but this was the way he had to pass to mutter and murmur it, to express and visualize it, to declare it and bring it to this level of ebullient intensity.
As if he had to pierce, here and now, and with all his might, the impenetrable spaces of images to better escape and save himself, all his works, and all those envisaged in them.

Marc Donnadieu