Faces in Transparency
The Plum Blossom for the Grand Ricci project
novembre 20, 2017
New York reveals the light
juillet 10, 2020„Like floating in the air”
This project illustrates
the confluence of two inspirations.
The first one was born from walks in Shanghai gardens.
There, Franqueuil came across some exquisite plays of light through the various densities of the foliage.
The light filtering in from these organic occurrences was finishing its course on various pools of water meticulously positioned for the sheer delight of the eye.
Its intricacy spreading like echoes from basins to basins seemed to recompose the space around the visitor in an elegant new vision of reality.
The second inspiration came from visiting studios of master glassmakers.
For few years, Franqueuil had been interested in the visual effects allowed through the glass.
Throughout history, this special material has integrated vast artistic possibilities with the ancestral know-how of glass making. Noticing the broken colored pieces of glass in the waste bins of the craftsmen’s studios, Franqueuil found in the light playing through these disregarded pieces some similarities with the one encountered in the Shanghai gardens. He then saw a way to combine these refuses into a new mode of creation. More than just a mere painting, the fractured facets assembled in a bed of translucent resin made any picture float delicately in the air.
Sealed in the transparency of the resin, the luminosity diffused through the composition enabled another dimension to its first meaning. In that fashion, the large portraits standing among the vegetation of a park for this project add to the ethereal action of light the fragility of the human face.
