FRANCK BAILLEUL
From the sky, the earth, a scrap, a passing shape and a spider’s web

Pacific Design Center is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by French artist Franck Bailleul: From the sky, the earth, a scrap, a passing shape and a spider’s web, which opens Friday, September 30 from 5:00 – 9:30 pm. The exhibition consists of 12 paintings and runs through December 31, 2016.
The title of the exhibition refers to Picasso’s description of an artist: “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” This quote aptly describes Franck Bailleul observation of his sky as he captures specific points in time, suspending a soluble moment in an image that both echoes and transcends the multiplicity of pictorial as well as literary representations of the sky.
The painter-poet’s ostensible realism via oil on canvas draws us into a new reality that is set in motion by a dialectic between light and shadow, fluidity and stasis, transparency and opacity; a world that is at the same time tangible and ethereal, transfigured by his brush and by liquid color.
Bailleul states: I do not paint skies, but human feeling through the prism of skies…a receptacle of our emotions…
Transported by the dreamlike character of the image presented to his gaze, the observer can steer his own course across the canvas, driven by his sensibility, desire, life history, experience and cultural bearings.
On each canvas, the sky swathes itself for his benefit in labyrinths of cloud that invite him to pursue an infinite set of fresh narratives. Franck Bailleul’s other skill is to make each of his works into a mirror of sorts, in which any observer will find something that is true both of himself and of mankind, in a relationship where conflict and communion are conflated and in which individuality and community are fused.

Helen Varola / Art advisory