Fragments – Biographie

Franck Saïssi was born in 1975 in Grenoble, to a father from Nice and a Catalan mother who came from exile. From an early age, he found in painting a parallel language — a way to express himself without having to use words. In an unstable family environment marked by silence and wandering, drawing became a form of survival.

After studying art in Lyon, and then in Italy where he explored sculpture and language, he continued his training in Paris. A brutal episode within the framework of the Fine Arts led to a psychiatric internment that would leave a deep mark. He emerged from it in the late 1990s and settled in Nice. There, in a city bathed in light, he began a long and quiet recovery.

It would take him years — including several spent teaching visual arts in various schools throughout the region — to regain confidence and find his place. The support of the artist Ben, his first solo exhibitions, and being granted a studio by the City of Nice marked a turning point. It was in this space, away from institutions, that his painting finally found its direction, its language, its scale.

His work has since explored abandoned places — asylums, manors, deserted factories — but beyond the subject matter, it probes thresholds: interior/exterior, reality/illusion, architecture/memory. Perspective begins to blur, matter breathes, and the image seems to hover between disappearance and emergence. Instability becomes a strength. Ambiguity, a path.

Today, Franck Saïssi continues a demanding, singular body of work, shaped by resilience, silence, and haunted by questions of perception, loss, and reconstruction.

For him, painting means assembling the fragments of a silent story.