François-Xavier Marange presents a dozen new acrylic on canvas mounted on wood panel paintings of strange, yet almost recognizable, forms that border on artifacts of a distant civilization whose rituals have escaped us. Indicating an attachment to a formal approach, this painter’s uncluttered works are characterized by an effective simplicity. “François-Xavier Marange starts from an idea and develops it by working on the painting in a synthetic manner. In order to do this, he shapes the medium through the use of various plastic means and processes, in particular grid, line and texture.” Textured, highly nuanced forms float upon smooth, dark backgrounds, creating contrasts that are at once both subtle and very powerful. “The use of flat colour absorbs light in a more diffuse way, while the uniformity of a coloured mass is broken up when pigments are more thickly applied. The artist plays with these different possibilities. In the society in which we live, swamped with visual information, in which images pass in front and move past us at lightning speed, Marange’s work instead stands out for its spareness, simplification and essentiality. It asks for—and requires—silent contemplation.”
(Excerpts from Architecturer la matière, by Jean de Julio-Paquin)