The exhibition opens a few days after the opening of a huge anthological exhibition, Contre nature, dedicated to the artist by the Bozar Museum, Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels.
The show in Belgium presents the first forty years of the artist’s research with several works, from the earliest to the present, creating a path of shifting connections that transform the museum into an extension of his studio.
The idea of the solo show at the gallery in Naples follows the same concept: to present iconic works of his most recent production, adapted and rethought for the space in Piazzetta Nilo. Michel François focuses his artistic practice on the study of materials, on the results of balances and contamination of plastic forms. Reality is from time to time questioned by the artist with the use of everyday objects extorted from their context and proposed with ever different uses, suspended in a state of perennial balance and fragility.
On view a series of sculptures, installations, drawings and lithographs that recreate a modified reality in which opposites seem to float in a precarious equilibrium, always aimed at a possible change.
The exhibition opens with the impressive Golden Cage, a cage covered entirely with gold leaf that, with its over four square meters, occupies the entire room. Made of thin metal and large grids, the work opens up to multiple suggestions related to the idea of imprisonment and escape because, despite being made of gold, it is still a cage. An ambiguity of meaning given to the viewer who must decode the work according to his sensitivity.
On a museum scale, the work Retenue d'eau, suspended from the ceiling like an ancient chandelier, is composed of the cluster assembly of over two hundred small transparent bags filled with water tied to nylon threads. The work synthesizes many of the themes related to the artist’s sculpture made up of physical tensions, voids, solids and a poise of forces. A combination of everyday elements that take on monumental proportions recreating a glass effect but without using that material.
Accompanied by drawings and lithographic prints, the exhibition is enriched with chairs assembled in precarious balance, aluminum strips that with the use of magnets compose sculptures with sinuous lines and finally of burnt apples that leave the mark of their passage on the gallery walls.
And again suspended from the ceiling almost fifty balloons stacked almost to touch the ground. A souffle perdu, red and black blown glass balloons of various sizes contain the breath of the artist with different air volume depending on his physical ability at the moment of breathing. With this gesture François enters even more personally into the creation of the work, although in an ephemeral and essentially immaterial way. The site-specific work Scribble has been reshaped for the exhibition: a large jumble of thin black aluminum wires aimed at creating an enormous scribble. The elements twist in every direction forming the spatial and three-dimensional wall transposition of a usually drawn form. As in many of François' scenographic works, matter moves freely, apparently uncontrolled, in a fictional loss of control, always as calculated as it is unpredictable.
