Photo credit : Philippe Aimar
Franck Saïssi was born in 1975 in Grenoble, to a Niçois father and a Catalan mother from political exile. From a very young age, painting became a parallel language — a way of expressing himself without using words. In a family environment marked by silence and instability, 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 years — including a period teaching visual arts in various schools — before he regained confidence and found his place. The support of the artist Ben, his first solo exhibitions, and the assignment of an artist studio by the City of Nice marked a turning point. In that space, away from institutions, his painting finally found its direction, its voice, its full dimension.
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.
