CONTACT : francoisbianco@hotmail.fr
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Since taking his first steps at Beaux-arts de Paris in Emmanuel Saunier’s studio, François Bianco has been creating assemblages that bring together different materials. Whether stone, cement, metal, sound or images, he always maintains a poetic relationship with
them, and always practices suggestion rather than affirmation. The notion of fragment is omnipresent in his work. Conceived as platforms that can accommodate other elements, his first works were modular compositions, some of which have been preserved and others already recycled within his own work, with the desire to preserve strata of memory that are not always visible at first glance (Innommées Insomnies, 2015).

SOUNDS

His pared-down forms evoke minimal art, more on the side of Robert Morris or Richard Serra than Sol LeWitt or Donald Judd. The noisy research of John Cage, the experiments of La Monte Young and the hallucinations produced by Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine also come to mind. However, François Bianco’s own practice has been shaped less by the visual arts than by sound, in particular by forms of industrial techno, close to ritual music from Amazonia or Scandinavia,familiar to him since adolescence, but also from experimental music, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Helicopter Quartett. This is the source of his “walls of sound”, which recall the shape of subwoofers and evoke the passage of vibrations through vent systems, like vocal cords in the throat. Starting with a trip to Finland in 2012, these two aspects of his existence became intertwined in a performer’s sculpture whose structure is made of metal tubes (Tuska, 2012). For him, sound is linked to the idea of landscape, a mental landscape. His sculptures feature abstract forms that even evoke musical scores: Here, two parallel seismographic lines, like a “musical trench” written in cement, draw silent rhythms of which he is the composer (strato sentiero, 2015); there, pieces of white marble outcropping on the surface of a cement volume like musical notes (SPECIMEN Résurgences, 2013); sometimes, even the whole work evokes the variations of a stave (Le Dernier Souffle du Cyclope, 2015).

IMAGE

François Bianco’s images are rare, but not absent. One of his videos - of which he has made very few - which was presented at his ENSBA graduation in a dialogue with sculptural and sound pieces, functions as a hallucinatory landscape. In a magic lantern atmosphere, we occasionally recognize the features of a face in stone. Using a digital camera, he films the projection of a Super8 film, from which he scratches the film, onto stone sculptures that evoke art brut, Etruscan art and African masks (Subsistance, 2013). This colorful, spectral scrolling is akin to collage. It’s silent, but the hypnotic pulsations of the montage are highly musical, with occasional shifts to black so that the viewer loses the thread. This emotionally charged work recalls both the flicker of experimental cinema and the magic of popular belief.

TOWARDS PICTORIALITY

When he installs his works in space, François Bianco composes them as if they were sounds, as if he were organizing the movement of bodies around them, and the scrolling of images that follow one another and fade away before the visitor’s eyes. There’s a strong
cinematographic dimension to his work. In his work, the materiality of the objects (which he makes himself) coexists with a sense of transience that evokes the passage of time, absence and disappearance, in a way the permanent fantasy of the missing object. In the installation he has just presented at Jeune Création, the culmination of his current research, this relationship with time is particularly accentuated. It is made up of three modules, which could also be autonomous elements: one very flat, placed on the floor, which only reveals itself at the last moment in all its radical discretion (Mélopée sous la lame, 2015); the other much more complex, which unfolds in space like a kaleidoscope (strato sentiero, 2015); the third built around an icebreaker-shaped shell, made of full and empty spaces, which transforms into a cabinet of curiosities revealing precious treasures as you walk around it (fata bromosa, 2015). François Bianco works with metal, cement and stone panels, scraping, sanding, inlaying and oxidizing. Different strata form abstract landscapes. A dark red even contrasts with ensemble s of gray, black and white. Each panel reveals itself in a play of reflections, depending on where you stand. A new pictoriality emerges from this empirical research, and illusion reigns: metal resembles stone, cement resembles drawing on paper, and stone resembles paint and sound. It’s a cinematic illusion, with sharp and blurred areas, like memories that come and go.

Introducing, Anaël Pigeat,
ARTPRESS 431, March 2016

Born in 1985, France.
Graduate from Beaux arts de Paris, 2013
Graduate from LISAA Paris, 2008




Exhibitions

2023
COPYLEFT, Galerie La non-maison, Aix-en-Provence
Anime Oscure, Centro Corradino d’Ascanio, Raiano, Italie
1/72e Land Art, La Fabrique, Toulouse

2022
Les Fondeurs de Roue, Le Ru, Angers

2021
Ohne Titel, FREE FRAGS, Atelier le Houloc, Aubervilliers
Radical Digital Practicises, Centre Tchèque, Paris - FREE FRAGS - OHNE TITEL
Aänenlumo, FREE FRAGS, MUU Galleria, Helsinki

2020
Novembre Numérique , Institut Français de Helsinki - FREE FRAGS -

2019
Art Theorema - Imago Mundi Highlights, Trieste, Italy
Les fondeurs de roue : Résidence 2angles, Flers, France

2018
Human being / Black Sound, Galerie Les filles du calvaire, Paris
Tesselles/ Pixels, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Salon de Montrouge, Montrouge
100% Beaux arts, La Villette, Paris
RATAFIA, Collectif 23, Paris


2016
Specimens, Element a, Paris (solo show)
OLA KALA! Tout va bien ! CAC Saint Restitut
Une deuxième image, Maison des Arts, Malakoff, curator Anaël Pigeat / Renaud-Auguste Dormeuil
D’autres possibles, Pavillon Vendôme, Clichy, curator Thomas Fort
Jeune Création, Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Pantin
Soundscapes : sound performance, Khiasma, Les Lilas
Railroads : psound performance, Pavillon Vendôme, Clichy

2015
Makimono / History of Transe, sound performance, Palais de Tokyo
History of Transe, sound performance, Galerie See studio, Paris
Bêche / Pioche de Fanny Didelon, sound design

2014
Paginae, Atelier Annette Huster, Paris
Le Moment Grec, Aegina museum, Greece
Anazítisi, ENSBA, Paris
Château à six, Château de Saint-Ouen

2013
Achievement,ENSBA (Bèlvédère)
Substance, ENSBA (solo show)
Jardin Éphémère, Saint-Ouen

Aequador de Laura Huertas Millán, sound design
The Panels of Silence : Karnak Temples, audio edition
Joïk / Mute : vinyl edition

2012
The Panels of Silence : Railroad sounds vinyl edition

2023
1/72e LandArt
Ukraine Utopie Commotion (auto-édition)

2021
Almanach Ides de Mars (auto-édition)

2018
Art absolument, Human Being/ Black Sound, Tom Laurent
Human Being / Black Sound, journal

2016
EA1, Paris
Moment Grec, Éditions du Regard
Introducing, Anaël Pigeat, ArtPress 431, mars