Everchanging
François Daireaux
Everchanging stemmed from a continually evolving process that led to unexpected outcomes incorporating chance, manipulation, play. Past work explored the dualities of decay and growth, repulsion and attraction and the life of the work was often transformed in response to specific exhibition sites. His work makes frequent reference to natural processes of change, organic forms and landscape.
His use and manipulation of materials often results in ambiguous and contradictory forms. Everchanging presented intricate interlaced networks of extruded lines, suspended as architectural elements that both guided and confronted the viewer in a passage through the gallery.
Everchanging was his first major exhibition in the UK, although Daireaux has exhibited widely internationally, including Morocco, Italy, Bulgaria and Belgium.
About The Artist
To decide to leave and see how things happen elsewhere : this is the choice made by the artist François Daireaux, always ready to take the pulse of the world, its heartbeats, pressures and pulsations, its cadences, arhythmia, moments of rest, its silences and noises. On the lookout for possible points of contact, collecting sounds and images (both film and photos), all preserved by the recording material he brings with him on his journeys : digital video camera, analogue still camera and recording devices.
François Daireaux seeks out original sites; his travels take him where men live and work. Far from tourist maps or any form of exoticism, for almost twenty-five years now Daireaux has embarked alone, travelling to countries he’s never visited before, to record his experiences there.
In the process he composes the vocabulary of his oeuvre, which can be considered as an extended space of sculpture—notably through his manner of composing his photographic images and films. He works as a gleaner, or forager, harvesting forms, situations and images in a pugnacious and solitary exercise of observation. He hollows out and sculpts the layers of the real, obsessed by gesture and the transformations it creates, in physical matter as well as in social space.
In the last few years, the artist’s photographic and film work has intensified, affirming a visual oeuvre in which we appreciate the contours and the investment, both in its questioning of the alienation of bodies and in its sensitised approach to the urban entropy of emerging nations.
