Statement
I work on what persists when places come undone.
My paintings emerge from spaces under tension:
broken architectures, unstable thresholds, interiors where the outside seeps in like an intrusion.
I look for forms that reveal fractures, shifts-zones where memory still clings.
For me, painting is a way to reconfigure these spaces:
to bend them, overturn them, strip them of their certainties.
It is not about depicting a place, but about opening a mental field.
My technique follows a slow tradition inherited from the Venetians.
build, let dry, return.
Each layer is an excavation.
What matters to me is the memorial impact:
a space that persists even as the image recedes.
Biography
Photo credit : Philippe Aimar
Franck Saïssi (born 1975, Grenoble) lives and works in Nice.
His work investigates unstable architectures, abandoned sites, and threshold spaces.
Formé à l’École Émile Cohl (Lyon), aux Beaux-Arts de Carrare (Italie) puis aux Ateliers de la DAC à Paris, il poursuit une recherche picturale rigoureuse axée sur la profondeur du noir et la superposition de strates.
A defining experience during his formative years shaped his attention toward zones of fracture, enclosed interiors, and areas where Internal and external worlds bleed into one another.
This tension is never literal; it provides a foundation from which he constructs a mental, memorial, almost architectonic form of painting.
Based in Nice since the late 1990s, he has developed a demanding practice that also extends to drawings on antique books and nautical charts, engaging notions of palimpsest, erasure, and the superimposition of narratives.
Selected exhibitions
• Lost, Maison Abandonnée [Villa Cameline], Nice (2021)
• Perfect Day : Drug and Art, WhiteBox, New York (2021–2022)
• La Vie est un Film, Le 109, Nice (2019)
• Le Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, Musée du Facteur Cheval, Hauterives (2016)
• ST-ART Strasbourg (2023)
• Paréidolie, Marseille (2025)
Depuis plusieurs années, il entretient un lien fort avec la Maison Abandonnée [Villa Cameline]. Le regard engagé et le soutien d’Hélène Fincker ont été déterminants dans la maturation et la visibilité de son œuvre.