Artist: François Rouan

TEMPLON welcomes François Rouan, one of the leading lights of the French contemporary art scene, to its New York space for his first solo show in the city. Coordinated by Alfred Pacquement, honorary general curator of heritage.

The exhibition features a selection of paintings and photographs taken from the artist’s recent and earlier series as well as a loan from the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation in New York.

At the start of his career François Rouan was linked with the Supports/Surfaces movement without officially associating himself with it. Since then he has trodden a unique path. He gradually extended his painting work with in-depth research into collages, leading to his first experiments with braiding in 1965. He further broadened his practice in the 1980s with the use of different mediums, both photographic and film-based. He deconstructed the painting’s traditional structure and broke new ground with an exploration of fresh avenues in French contemporary painting.

As abstract expressionism flourished in the USA, abstract art in France renounced lyrical abstraction in favour of a more radical approach to the concept of the painting. The New York Pierre Matisse Gallery showed the young François Rouan’s work alongside established artists such as Simon Hantaï and Pierre Soulages. His art went on to feature in the collections of major American museums including MoMa and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The retrospective exhibition at Galerie Templon features thirty pieces, wax paintings and photographic work in various formats – square, rectangular and oval – all created between 1969 and 2024. Recorda interweaves the artist’s brand new eponymous series, created in 2023-2024, with older pieces from the late 1960s, 1980s and 1990s. Together they bear witness, once again, to the artist’s insatiable passion for working with the surface. Rouan begins by focusing on strips of canvas dyed in a palette of explosive hues, from canary yellow and brick red to cobalt blue and coal black. He carefully braids them on the painting then plays with the result, boldly shredding, interlacing, reviewing, completing or even breaking up the surface and starting all over again. Behind the seeming simplicity of motifs and colour range lie some of the metaphysical questions that obsess the artist, such as the painting as a work of art, the world’s origins, body image, and human existence.