François-Régis Lemonnier

François-Régis Lemonnier's paintings explore man and his environment. In his paintings, tiny characters float in large spaces, move about and meet each other, trying their own condition, solitude, joy, poverty, solidarity and oversight. Their tiny size highlights their great humility: man and his destiny, singular, happy or dramatic, in a world of constant change.

Using raw materials, sand, Sienna, oxidised zinc, gold or lead leaf, as well as tinted areas with oil and acrylic paints in his works, the artist invents a space made of points, pure lines and geometric forms for man, in which he has to find his place.

His practice is above all else a look at man, each little silhouette able to represent a cultural, geographic, mythological or historical symbol in the painter's imagination. Whether he places man in the marine world with his Saint-Malo origins or in a mountainous or urban landscape, the painter's reflection tends towards the universality of the place of man in his environment.

Far from representation and realism, François-Régis Lemonnier's paintings rise above and form open windows on the world, an immense world, swallowing an increasingly small, almost invisible man. These journeys to the centre of the universe are also journeys to our inner self, the deepest part of our inner being, where body and form disappear to leave space for the dissipation of the mind.