In this second fragment, Michel Gathier — art critic and journalist — offers a sensitive and free interpretation of my work.
He explores echoes, breaches, and persistences, through a perspective that is not mine but that moved me deeply.
Franck Saïssi, or the Crossing of the Mirror
Here is the story of an inverted world, just as Lewis Carroll imagined it in Through the Looking-Glass. It is on this very mirror that reality settles and duplicates itself before transforming through the twists and turns of fiction. So much so that the mirror breaks, perspectives crumble, and each shard extracts memory from the armor of reality, which then splits open. Here, memory scatters into indistinct lines — those of anxieties or dreams, and those of the memory of art — the fertile ground on 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 confronts. Yet he knows that it is within this enclosure, like grammar in any language, that everything begins again, and that it is only a matter of introducing a new vocabulary for other journeys through time. If the drawings illustrate this original page with their geographic backgrounds or their walled-in faces, painting never ceases to haunt him, and Franck Saïssi excels at these overflowings 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 nonetheless no need to search for ghosts. Unless the frame of each image finally reveals the specter that haunts each of us, lurking in the depths of our own anxieties 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 draftsman and painter who knows how, through the interplay of line and color, to introduce fractures of reality and all the stereotypes that condition it. Sometimes, the appearance of a cinematic reference heightens this sense of distortion that the artist blends with other overlapping effects between scars and delicate fades. Yet the image stubbornly refuses any anecdote in this tense confrontation with the materiality of the work, as we expect it to reveal itself. But we already understand, in this mirror game, that it is up to us to feed the work with our own gaze for it to come alive. And suddenly, all these images imprint themselves on the empty screen where our own fiction is written.
Michel Gathier
Art critic, journalist
