At first sight, we could think that her works disturb us, inasmuch as they represent a world unknown, as dark as the ink of our nights, a world of fancy. It is not so. Our uneasiness, both attraction and repulsion, originates in the unveiling of a world we have known, yet forgotten or repressed. Useless to ask Dr Freud : our own unconsciousness speaks up, our own flesh shivers. As a sensitive artist, Françoise brings back to life a universe of ghosts, phantasms alive, sunken in shadows.
The broken and tortures dolls of a betrayed and forsaken childhood. Why should her works be touching and expressive ? Because they have become familiar to us, victims and tormentors as we are. It is the encounter and the mission of the artist to be able to be a Jew and a Kapo at the same time.
True enough, we are all guilty, as she is, of all that happened : terrible suffering, ghastly martyrs - and our indifference !. What may be marginal though essential in our lives is always written in the margin. Our lives are not revealed in our successes but in our shortcomings. All our appointments are failures.
Françoise, a vigil, an artist, a medium dares assume the most difficult task : tell the truth - but can the beauty of an outcry describe what is felt ?. Then, she speaks with her hands as to wipe out, brush out what gives birth to Beauty, whether in a grin or in fear. In her collages, Françoise is our defective mirror, our made up puzzle. She goes on the other side with determination and kindness just like a shaman. She invites us to the banquet of ‘Baron Samedi’, tears off the masks and unmasks the zombies.
Back to painting : an original attempt when we were still fetuses. Françoise has the paradoxical gesture of a painter who eradicates what she wants to show. She is a painter who leaves out painting. Her gesture discovers darkness, blackness, that is death. To create with death, to be born with death, to live with death. Expiatory works to wash out our tints and our lives.
She would quote the poet :“I will wash my heart in the river like a cloth reddening with the harshness of fate”. Nearly an act of catharsis that brings forward and back the mask into a grin. She fullfils her work. I admire her, I feel like saving all her paintings, collages and ragdolls. Shivering shrines of parting recollections. To like them with you, to let you share them as a gift.
Serge Lamour, art advisor