by Frédéric Dégranges

Frédéric Dégranges was born in France in 1966. He spent the first years of his life in Tunisia and then his family moved back to France, to Orleans. He discovered drawing as a child, through comics (by Hergé, Franquin, Moebius). In 1987, Frédéric Dégranges was accepted at the École Régionale des Beaux Arts in Angoulême and started studying comics. At that time, drawing was for him a way of seeing things: he would draw sketches without looking at the paper, trying to translate his vision on paper. In 1990 he started to work in animation. Little by little, his personal artistic practice took its distance from his profesionnal work. Frédéric Dégranges rejected the images as they are today, standardized objects. American experimental music (La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, Charlemagne Palestine, Steve Reich and Eliane Radigue) had a great influence on the evolution of his practice. In 2009 he started drawing his first "grids": minimalist drawings, abstract and repetitive. His drawings are "visual music", made of lines that form vibrating, luminous surfaces. This is his drawing practice today: it is writing, tecture, trace, a way to model the material graphically - all this, to let us See. “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there… What you see is what you see.” - Frank Stella