François Génot

François Génot borrows his attitude and the impetus of his approach from the resistance and proliferation of living things. He develops a sensitive and energetic formal language, punctuated by his experience of places. Travelling, collecting and paying particular attention to materials, forms and natural phenomena feed his practice. His attention to the spontaneous, everyday nature that inhabits our anthropised spaces opens the door to the human, animal, plant and mineral worlds around him, with which he tries to find new ways of cohabiting and sharing. The processes he develops as the seasons go by and the different environments he visits enable him to maintain an active collaboration with living things. The empirical methods that emerge from his systems of attention, the interplay of forms and materials, and his actions in the field all bear witness to an approach geared towards understanding and translating other forms of language and modes of expression of living things.

During his residency, François Génot is interested in the interstices and margins of an area undergoing major change, questioning the notion of wasteland through the prism of living things. The industrial sites (Metzerschmelz, Ellergronn, etc.) will be examined through the prism of the living world, and botany in particular, as a revealing, fragile witness to intertwined histories.

He has been active on the international scene since 2005, with numerous residencies and exhibitions. In recent years, his work has been included in the collections of the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg and the FRAC Alsace. He has been teaching drawing at the Ecole Supérieure d'Art de Lorraine in Metz since 2016. In 2023 he began a collaboration with the LMNO gallery in Brussels, he developed a large-scale project with the FRAC Alsace around questions of ferality as artist and curator, carried out a residency at the Ferme Asile in Sion in the Swiss Valais and presented two solo exhibitions at Engramme in Quebec and at the HBK in Saarbrücken in Germany, he took part in the Luxembourg Art Week with the Octave Cowbell gallery and in the Fertile exhibition project in Paris.

The year 2024 marked the birth of La maison des feuilles, a studio in Alsace Bossue, co-founded with Vanessa Gandar, which combines research and creation, meetings and sharing of ideas, bringing together artists, authors and researchers with a common interest in the artistic experience, attention to the living and the question of links, care and territory. At the same time, François Génot took part in the duo exhibition Langue Rhône with Vanessa Gandar at the Orangerie (Bastogne, Be) and the Drawing Now Art Fair (Paris, Fr) with the LMNO gallery. He has also developed a solo exhibition entitled Soleil noir, for the Espace d'Art Contemporain André Malraux, (Colmar, Fr) and a residency with the association Canop Terre (Erstein, Fr) supported by the Résidence du territoire programme of the Frac Alsace.