Romain Froquet
Romain Froquet is a french artist, born in 1982 in Villeurbanne (Fr). He lives and works in Paris.
The works of Romain Froquet are an invitation to the fantasy and the uniqueness of a universe stemming from his own subconscious. Froquet, a self-taught artist directs his passion for drawing to diverse mediums without prejudice. He is as comfortable painting on an easel, or on the street enveloping the walls of lost dismal areas of town or creating site specific installations. He wishes to express himself with or without a public sometimes choosing obscure urban areas to dress the walls with his delicate tree like representations that bring color and joy to an otherwise gloomy background. The surface is of no importance nor the visibility of his installations, here he presents himself as an ephemeral artist and as a performer —it is his process that becomes paramount not the actual public display.
Froquet’s work is a condensation of complexities. His constant struggle to conciliate the abstract with the figurative pushes him to an almost surreal state of mind whereby the completion of the artwork is no longer the primary goal but the vehicle to an ulterior motive. This finale for which he perseveres becomes a lifeboat that transports him constantly to new experimentation. Each new drawing, painting or ephemeral intervention becomes the relic that documents and preserves research, gesture and experience. Tormented by his desire for freedom from the classical rigors which are revealed in the colorful manga drawings he delicately marries to primitive African stylizations of figurative elements. Froquet remains however faithful to the exactitude and perfection dictated by architectures and spacial relations. His mood, his inspiration and the constant need for gesture, line and continual movement recall the nervous and excited abstractions of Pollock and Riopelle.
References abound in the artworks created by this young autodidact with an old soul. It is Arshile Gorky’s work however that I can see most clearly impregnated in his stroke. Gorky insisted on projecting ideas from his past and personal history through a novel technique at a time period when all seemed to have been said in abstraction. He was unafraid to reference and to reinvent past styles and strokes of his contemporaries such as Pollock and De Kooning. He clearly stated his mindset in his many quotes. " Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with this eyes... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into the unknown areas."
