François Reboul: From Chaos to Freedom

François Reboul, French artist active between Venice and Provence, presents a new series of works produced from 2020, based on a personal rereading of abstract expressionism. His painting operates within the tradition of the New York School while questioning its premises and reactivating its possibilities. Rather than quoting a historical language, it is used as an operative device: painting becomes a site of verification, a process built through gesture.

The exhibition presents 20 paintings that follow a clear progression in scale and pictorial density. Surfaces are often rough and marked, making the work of the hand visible without mediation. The painting exposes its own making. As curator Vittoria Brachi notes, each layer bears witness to the passage of the artist’s brush, with acrylic paint sliding or forming thick, tridimensional elements.

Predominantly vertical formats emphasise frontality and the absence of illusionistic depth. Colour acts entirely on the surface through intense combinations that evoke a distant memory of Venetian tradition, from Tintoretto to Tiepolo. Within this structure, instability emerges: images oscillate between abstraction and figuration, with female bodies surfacing and dissolving into matter.

A chiaroscuro tension is introduced through black and blue lines that construct edges and suggest depth. Painting becomes a field of forces between decomposition and recomposition, control and loss, approaching a near-surreal dimension where images emerge in fragments.

For the artist, abstraction is a form of freedom: painting interrupts thought and fixes immediate tension on the canvas, producing “visual situations” rather than resolved images. In some Untitled works, configurations approach the figure without stabilising; even when the body appears, it remains a trace intensified by colour.