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 the past few years, he has benefited from the committed insight of Hélène Fincker — director of the art center La Maison Abandonnée [Villa Cameline] — who has supported him with rare loyalty along this journey.

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