I’ve always been attracted by painting but I’ve spent long years at drawing, which seemed to me the best way to build and translate my vision of the world. My practise of interior architecture has allowed me to understand and create shapes, matters and colours as well as the process which ends in final work.

I’ve come to painting first through the figurative way, but quickly I felt more at ease with abstraction. Really abstraction gives me a greater freedom more by suggestion than by demonstration. I don’t want to be part of a particular tendency or a specific trend. My first preoccupation is to express my vision of the world through the choice of shapes and colours.

As a fan of poetry, mainly of the surrealist period, I’ve long worked on its relation with painting. Painting and poetry appear to me narrowly linked. They are real partners, the poet using words, the painter using specific tools, diverse matters, shapes and colours but following a similar process characterized by the composition of images, abstract or not. But what is said of poetry can be said of music as well. And I’ve worked on the connection with poetry, integrating music little by little. The conjonction of these arts is like a Pandora box from which the thread of inspiration oozes and that leads to see beyond appearances. Of course I didn’t want to translate the poetical or musical image as they were, but grasp the spirit of a poem or of a music to make it mine, interpret it in my way and get rid of  it at the same time. I’ve even gone through the writing of poems when images came to my mind, that I couldn’t find in my familiar poets. So I could translate them better in my painting.

This approach is permanent. It is the leading thread of my work. My first exhibition was entitled « Painting and Poetry ». The poets went from Aragon, Eluard, Gerard de Nerval to Baudelaire and Nietzche, Holderlin and Nazim Hikmet. As for the musicians, Schubert essentially.

Nevertheless, I didn’t want to get enclosed in an only relation with poetry and music. I’ve always felt myself tuned in to the surrounding world and painting was to allow me to express a particular sensitivity to the events of the world, either social or political which had an echo in me, a questioning turned towards the relation between Art and the world. One of my exhibitions has traced back a course which expressed blazing, tearing off, destruction as well as liberty and utopia. On that occasion , I found back Mahmoud Darwich, an engaged Palestinian poet, a poet of disquiet, resistance,hope which echo some of my works.

I have essentially worked oil canvas painting and I have a real preference for a palette of natural colours, favouring flights of reds and ochres of all shades. Working on the matter with all the tools proposed to the painter. I first refer to the drawing before a first approach to the painting, which changes and is built according to the colour-shape relation. The most difficult for me it’s to put an end to the painting, by signing it. I always need some time of necessary clarification before coming back to the painting and consider it ended.

My essential  preoccupation remains to be able to translate the images stuck in my memory to give shape to my need of communication, through my artistic production, a will of permanent awakening to the world and emancipation.

Francis MOREAU

Group show:

• Paris – Espace Gustave           – 2024
• London                       – 2023
• Rome                        – 2022
• Venise                        – 2022
• Thionville                       – 2021
• Senlis                                   – 2021
• Cologne                                                            – 2020
• Séoul                        – 2019
• Tokio                                               – 2019
• Carrousel du Louvre                                               – 2019
• Espace d’art contemporain  Arcueil – 2019
• Galerie Thuillier Paris – 2019
• Salon des artistes français Grand Palais – 2019
• Salon d’Automne  Grand Palais           – 2018
• 39^ème Salon international  Le Puy en Velay  – 2018
• 15^ème Salon européen  Brugge          – 2018
• 1^er Salon international  Condeixa Portugal   – 2018
• Galerie Monod  Paris     – 2018
• Salon des artistes français Grand Palais  – 2018
• We can control space   New York         – 2017
• Art Capital Grand Palais                          – 2015
• Pavillon de l’Ermitage  Paris                   – 2008

Solo show:

• Maison George Sand Montpellier               – 2015
• Salle La Peyre  Joyeuse – Ardèche          – 2015
• Galerie de Causans   Paris                – 2014
• Pavillon de l’Ermitage  Paris            – 2013
• Château de Faverges Haute Savoie             – 2009

Galleries:

• Debut Contemporary London
• Daylighted San Francisco
• Galerie Bruno Massa Paris
• Galerie Rambaud Vincennes