Critical archives

Historical Texts (2007-2021)

These texts bring together readings of my work produced between 2007 and 2021.
Today, they constitute an archive: landmarks and voices that accompanied the early stages of my practice during its transformation.
They are preserved here for their historical value.

Franck Saïssi, or the Crossing of the Mirror

This is the story of an inverted world, as Lewis Carroll imagined it in Through the Looking-Glass. It is upon this very mirror that reality settles and doubles itself, before transforming through the meanders of fiction. Until the mirror shatters, perspectives collapse, and each shard tears memory from the armor of reality, which then begins to crack. Here, it becomes scattered with indistinct lines — those of anxiety or dreams, and those drawn from the memory of art — that fertile ground upon which the artist always composes their own story.

Franck Saïssi gathers all these ruins, exhumes them, and brings them to light. He X-rays them, recomposes them in the light of past masters to contemplate this negative where only lines, stains, and color sketches remain to depict the framework of a story within which, nevertheless, we behold ourselves.
This broken mirror reflects vanishing lines like so many vanishing points. And streaks like stammerings. Or the infusion of emptiness at the heart of the storm. Somewhere, it is the silence of faces that answers absence. And architectures unfold over the ruins of a sky without cloud or sun. The images then respond only to those shores where everything we know of art is stranded, with its theatrical scenes in the return of the eternity of mythologies, heroic gestures, or the silence of still lifes. The artist restores the decomposed signs as fragments to reconstruct the representation of our own mental image, where the truth of our gaze is played out.

The frame always remains a confinement within space. To break free from it — that would be the dizzying utopia the artist faces. Yet he knows that it is within this very enclosure, much like grammar within any language, that everything begins again. The task, then, is only to introduce a new vocabulary for other journeys through time. If the drawings echo this original page with their geographic backdrops or walled-in faces, painting continues to haunt it — and Franck Saïssi excels in these overflows from one to the other.

An explorer’s work to elucidate these underground passages between shadow and the forms it shapes. As if one must always escape, find a gap toward the light. And slip through it, climb the rigging of impossible perspectives to grasp the beating heart of space. Always going further, layer after layer, to gather samples of life and meaning.

The works, instinctively, read like a luminous poem to the night — to what it holds and what it distills. In what might suggest abandoned ruins, there is no need to look for any ghost. Unless, of course, the frame of each image finally reveals the specter that haunts each of us, lurking in the depths of our own fears and desires.

If the composition of the painting ensures an extreme balance, we must expect it to be disturbed by the enigma it contains. The painting is often shrouded in a monochrome mist as if the color were absorbed by the form. Lines cut through space while the shades sponge it up, as if to cauterize the wound. Drawings and paintings, behind the scenes of meaning, clash in a great struggle that stirs heaven and earth for chipped faces and gutted palaces.
Franck Saïssi is a draughtsman and painter who knows how to introduce fractures of reality—and of all the stereotypes that shape it—through the interplay of line and color. At times, the appearance of a cinematic reference heightens the sense of disruption the artist cultivates, blending it with other effects of layering, between scars and delicate fades. Yet the image stubbornly resists all anecdote in this tense confrontation with the materiality of the work, as we await its revelation. But we already understand, in this mirror game, that it is up to us to nourish the work with our own gaze so that it may come to life. And all these images suddenly imprint themselves onto the blank screen where our own fiction is written."

Michel Gathier (2021)
Art critic, journalist

A painter's studio offers the art pilgrim the possibility of a shock, a discovery, the sudden presentation of the unusual—contrary to exactly what was expected.

In the work of Franck Saïssi, beneath the unleashed lines and colors one might imagine, one immediately captures the pictorial attitude: that which balances forms, grounds proportions, stabilizes flashes of brilliance, and refines intentional exaggerations…

A certain wisdom prevails; it organizes the painted or drawn piece and, far from limiting the apparent frenzy, strengthens it by granting it presence. Thus, the sensitivity of his creative flight and a respect for the art of painting evolve under the artist's control.

Saïssi belongs to figurative expression. Nudes, portraits, and landscapes are visible and assert themselves as such. Modernity, of course, erases useless detail, submission to verism, or artificial brilliance. The complicit wink to the beholder is banished, as is the charm of ease.

On the contrary, to enter this universe, one must accept its deliberate violence, the broad lines of its schematic thrusts, its contrasts, and even its ruptures.

Only then do the poetic elements intervene: the finesse of certain calligraphies, the charm that painting offers when it is adorned with sincerity and the humility of its emotion.

These works are vast—not merely through dimensions favorable to the gestural; they acquire their vastness from the breadth of their conception, for the subject here is but a pretext. In fact, the acrobatics and skill of the act of painting are fully realized here within the ethics of a vocation.

A desire to create, to know, and to master difficulty to the point of achieving the personal elegance of self-criticism and doubt. To persevere despite misunderstanding and criticism—is this not how one can claim to be a painter?


Michel Gaudet (2007)
AICA, Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters