Atahualpa

Mascarello experiments with materials and artistic techniques in order to translate into space both the potency and the fragility of manual gestures. Thanks to his extensive knowledge of material constraints, he brings to life the emotion essential to any art.

François Mascarello creates handmade wallpapers painted with oil on kraft, screens, bas-reliefs and stucco objects, sometimes enhanced with leather or straw marquetry, which evoke both the decorative arts and illumination.

Each of his ‘Wild Silk’ tapestry paintings is made in three stages. First Mascarello composes an abstract landscape on a computer, before painting it in oil on paper. This work is then converted into fabric. The thin strips of raw silk are cut, then sewn one by one by hand on silk or on white linen, using invisible stitches. The shimmering fabric thus reinterprets the painter's gesture and gives it a new dimension, at once warm, intriguing and tactile.

In François Mascarello’s words: “My painting already tended towards the abstract and quasi-choreographic movement. Today, I have added an architectural impulse, the idea being to explore all possible dimensions: from the smallest to the largest, from the deepest to the brightest, from the most elusive perspective to the most intimate line.”

The ‘Edifice’ light sculptures are both mysterious and refined micro-architectures. Handmade of immaculate white waxed stucco, they conceal an interior entirely covered in straw marquetry combining shades of blue, grey and beige. They are glowing edifices coming alive with light bouncing off of the straw marquetry and glowing through the different openings. They take on a new and different appearance depending on the angle from which they are viewed: a cubist house in the spirit of Le Corbusier or a skyscraper-like impressive vertical building.

[Biography provided by Galerie BSL]