Franck David

This singular artist possesses a clear determination to generate thought. To question the world, too, but through found objects, observed in the most ordinary everyday life. Each of franckDavid’s works thus results from a displacement that places the object in a state of suspension. What is there does indeed stem from an appropriation of reality, but the latter is modified, augmented—not through a logic of détournement, but rather through an enhancement of its potential to superimpose interpretations, most often political and poetic. In other words, the intervention on the object can be entirely minimal or, conversely, utterly radical.

And whilst the techniques, gestures and forms are so varied—ranging from the reworking of a crossword magazine to the presentation of a rosebush with lead thorns spinning on its own axis, or a collection of schoolchildren’s exercise books from around the world subtly enhanced—it is to better construct a syntax that compresses time and space, favouring the immediacy of the present. Moreover, it is no mere coincidence that many of his works draw on great literature, whilst others specifically question the status of the image. For franckDavid, nothing in our culture is taken for granted, fixed or definitive. On the contrary, each new work (one is sometimes reminded of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s famous series Oggetti in meno – ‘objects minus one’, 1965) constitutes a proposition that engages the viewer more than its author. The latter proposes, through his works, to introduce syntactic variables into the contemporary imagination.