Cours, Circa 2020

François Bard   Famous Artists

François Bard is a French painter born in 1959 in Lille (France). He lives and works in Paris.
He has studied painting at the Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) in Paris, and graduated in 1980.
He has been selected to be a resident at the Casa de Velazquez (Spain) from 1988 to 1990. He won the first Belmondo Prize in 1990 .From 1990 to 2000 he has been an oil painting professor at the Beaux-Arts Ateliers of the city of Paris.
Since September 2011, François Bard has been represented by a new gallery, the Olivier Waltman Gallery in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris (France).

The painting of François Bard combines a sharp observation of our time and his personal mythology. Mid-way between the great tradition of painting and a very cinematic universe, the artist creates a deep and intimate world. Like a chiaroscuro, his technique deploys flamboyant colors that seem to be mute at the same time.

His painting style, fine and old, evokes a very contemporary mural style, and it is a way for the artist to deliver his own vision of the Vanity. The depth of his subjects makes us think of the canvas treated as a cinema screen: black, intense, perfect for the mise en abîme.

François Bard ?s vocabulary can be associated with the heroines of David Lynch, the broken faces of Martin Scorcese and with the great American road movies.

The large formats and photographic framing force the viewer to confront the works directly. His characters and landscapes, although strange to us, seem surprisingly familiar. The work of François Bard escapes to categories; his canvases play with the codes of the narration and manipulate our gaze as they wish.