Visual artist Michel François, who works in various disciplines such as sculpture, video and photography, became known for his installations (landscapes, of sorts, of composite impressions), where the objects, displaced rather than stripped of their original function, redefine the codes of sensorial perception in areas which are deliberately vague: expanded office, intermediary living room… By juxtaposing living or inert materials to explore their fictive potential, Michel François keeps revealing, both to the mind and to the eye, the other side of visual artworks. Having been reduced to their material state, the objects exhibited by the visual artist become more concrete, just as they paradoxically become more abstract.

As a sculptor, he removes something from the sculpture or adds to the surrounding space; that which is compact falls apart: the perforated carpet; that which is positive becomes negative: the shadow of a projector. As a photographer, he divides or inverts perspectives in order to diffract viewpoints.

Michel François's artistic method is not limited, however, to the creation of the artwork but goes beyond this by impacting on the architecture of the space occupied by the engaged visitor's body, whose movements and sometimes concrete interventions are part of the life of the installation.

In effect, fascinated by the possibility of discovering what happens when an object or an image is presented to the public, Michel François turns the viewer into the active subject of his work by organizing genuine itineraries where the visitor engages not only his gaze but also his entire body in environments in which are spread out, in the full meaning of the term, all the signs and models of what commonly makes up and institutes the representation: the poster, the darkroom, the museum space, the television studio….

As a portrayer of Western society's urban and media landscapes, it is important for the visual artist to show the artefacts as well as the scraps of the real world.

This re-orientation of the visual artwork towards the notion of space and topology accounts for much of the interest Michel François has in the Gomis family home on the domain of La Ricarda a few miles outside Barcelona in Catalonia. This modernist building by the architect Antoni Bonnet is remarkable in that it was built in the fifties in a wooded and once-isolated stretch of land close to the sea, but has progressively become quite literally stuck between the sprawling Barcelona suburbs and the airport's runways.

Before becoming uninhabitable and being abandoned, this elaborate property was an important meeting place for such famous artists as Tapiès, John Cage and Miró. When the opportunity presented itself to turn it into the centre once again of a collective artistic experience, Michel François, with his taste for precarious spaces, responded enthusiastically. In July 2006, he thus invited 14 personalities, including visual and video artists, choreographers, stage designers and curators (Joerg Bader, Joël Benzakin, Lucia Bru, Jordi Colomer, François Curlet, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Pierre Droulers, Ann Veronica Janssens, Simon Siegmann, Loïc Vanderstichelen, Richard Venlet, Angel Vergara) to take over the premises and shoot a short film with or without actors, the only constant being the unity of space (La Ricarda) and of time (summer 2006). The aim of the project was the creation of a medium-length film signed jointly by all, and whose filmed fragments would come together in the editing process.

The result was a surprising temporary appropriation of the premises, made up of enigmatic episodes which, put together, are mutually enriching. Starting from the imposed framework, which is evoked by the bathroom, bedrooms, living room and the park surrounding La Ricarda, the participants who had been invited to La Ricarda for a few weeks shot scenes with diffuse temporalities which strongly contrast with the building's very graphic lines. This appropriation of the building, food for improvisations and sensations, was organised according to whether the host privileged a detail or, on the contrary, a global view of the building. When filmed, whether with or without people, La Ricarda forms the moving framework of a story with numerous entrance points. Left to the appreciation of a viewer who has embarked on an aimless journey, the building, seen as if through a prism, thus transforms itself into as many sonic and visual fragments (by turns funny, absurd, worrying) as there are directors and universes present. The result is that one no longer knows whether it is the directors who took over the premises or whether it is La Ricarda, a character in its own right, which, in the end, took over the directors.

This possible symmetry and this reversal are also to be found in the installation which Michel François is showing, his own creation this time, at La Raffinerie on the occasion of a carte blanche he received for the presentation of Flowers, by choreographer Pierre Droulers.

Studio is a set featuring a dozen projectors around a Cyclo, a technical device used by professional photographers to cancel out the shadows around objects which are to be photographed. This panel is here a mirror with an undulating surface, reflecting the light coming from the twelve projectors. A means of lighting which, paradoxically, is no longer one, since the lit object fades completely out of sight in the glare of the projectors.

Michel François is again experimenting with the possibility of a mise en abîme of the concept of exhibition and places the representation on the side of illusion. The spectator no longer sees anything, the object which should help us see better disappears, the spectacle represented here by means of this set of technical instruments merely points to an emptiness which only the spectator's imagination can fill. Michel François has in fact said about this set, which is supplemented by a pile of one thousand copies of a black and white poster representing the dog's kennel now abandoned at La Ricarda, that it is a kind of inverted image of the film.

In effect, if the film exists and the shooting really did take place, the installation on the other hand rests on an absence. No images, no directors, no actors: only the viewer can make the scene come alive through his gaze, except that he can only see the frame and the blinding light. This attempt to undo representation reveals the exhibition space to be like a space of which each one of us is probably both the master and the servant.

Raya Baudinet