Chiguer Art Contemporain is proud to present Imager le corps, an exhibition by François Morelli, celebrating his 50-year career this year. Driven by a fascination with the human condition and a deep desire to tell stories, the artist intertwines his intimate narratives, gathered through his wanderings around the world, with those of others. Through sculpture, painting, performance, and drawing, he expresses his relationship with otherness over time and space.
The reference to the human body, and more broadly, to the social body, permeates Morelli’s work. His sensual and dreamlike creations are populated by human figures with fluid, fragmented bodies adorned with motifs, seemingly in perpetual mutation or fusion, intertwining like nesting dolls or doubling like cells. Hollowed out, transparent, and permeable, these characters, composed of delicate interlacing, are traversed by a network of lines that, by crossing, form geometric patterns. Through these representations, François Morelli sensitively schematizes a plurality of social dynamics and conveys the evolving and changing nature of interpersonal relationships. Connecting the figures, the motifs of straps, belts, and harnesses reference sexuality and guide the viewer’s eye through the work, suggesting a narrative trajectory.
For Morelli, drawing is at the origin of every creation. It represents an intuitive and spontaneous gesture, a ritual act, both vital and visceral, which accompanies him daily. Through this medium, he crystallizes his concerns, emotions, and imagination. Because it precedes writing, drawing is, in his eyes, the mode of expression closest to thought and emotion.
L’envie de raconter
In his recent works, the artist skillfully combines figuration and abstraction, freehand drawing, and mechanical drawing with rubber stamps. Beneath their whimsical appearances, François Morelli’s stylized creations are deeply rooted in the real world and nourished by lived experiences. As an engaged artist, he tackles sensitive socio-political issues, bearing witness to the tensions and turmoil of our time. L’envie de raconter reveals a narrative fresco where his intimate stories intertwine with our collective histories. From the AIDS crisis, addressed in Body Politic, to the climate crisis at the heart of his new painting series Les jarres d’eau, the exhibition reflects the concerns that have occupied the artist over the years.
Following a logic of collage and assemblage inspired by modernism, a fragmentation of time and space occurs in the artist’s drawings. Disparate styles and narratives are juxtaposed and amalgamated within the same representation, offering the viewer multiple narratives and as many gateways to other worlds.
D’après le tisserin gendarme
With his new series entitled D’après le tisserin gendarme, Morelli transposes his sketchbooks into monumental paintings, offering an intimate and immersive incursion into his singular universe. Using ink washes and pigments sprayed with an atomizer, the artist imbues these paintings with an evanescent and ethereal atmosphere. In these intimate scenes, architectonic bodies float, undulate, and fall gracefully in undefined, suspended spaces. Intertwined in a carnal embrace, in perfect osmosis, these lattice-like bodies are traversed by tree branches, evoking a nest. Drawing inspiration from the mating ritual of the weaverbird — a bird that seduces by elaborately building a nest — the artist subtly explores the themes of the couple, seduction, love, and sexuality.
Around these figures, ink stains permeate the paper, evoking both expanding pathogenic or fungal organisms and Rorschach test patterns. By incorporating these fluid, formless, and random shapes into his works, Morelli opens up a space for free association, the subconscious, and imagination.
Les jarres d’eau
Created in 2024, Les Jarres d’eau is inspired by ancient Greek ceramics that depicted scenes of daily life and mythological stories. In Morelli’s iconography, vases embody containers of stories, symbols of memory and transmission. Here, the artist also echoes the figure of the water carrier, an ancient profession present in many cultures. These workers traveled on foot, delivering water and stories to people.
Created with a rubber stamp, water jars in metallic tones stand out against a black background, like fleeting apparitions emerging from the depths of consciousness or foreign bodies floating in the visual field. These spectral jars refer to a major global issue: the scarcity of potable water, drought, and desertification, a phenomena accelerated by climate change.
As in each of his works, Morelli also alludes, in this series, to previous performances, drawings, and sculptures. Through these self-referential allusions, he weaves continuity into his artistic production, composing a true map where multiple layers of meaning and significance overlap. Les Jarres d’eau thus alludes to a trilogy of performances emblematic of the artist, which took him on a journey across North America, the Maghreb, and Europe (Migrations (1984), Marche transatlantique (1945-1985) (1985), and Le Cycle transculturel (1986-1987)). In Marche transatlantique (1945-1985), he traveled great distances carrying on his back a fiberglass sculpture-container, his alter ego, in a way. This organic sculpture, evoking a skeletal human torso, was equipped with plastic tubes and was regularly filled with water from public fountains along the way. For Morelli, the water jar is a metaphor for the human body, itself composed mostly of water.
Body Politic
In 1988, while still living in New York, François Morelli began the Body Politic series, the title of which refers to a Canadian magazine published between 1971 and 1987. The sculptures were created in reaction to U.S. politics of the time, particularly concerning the AIDS crisis and, more broadly, sexuality. Through them, Morelli denounces the censorship movement surrounding the AIDS crisis, exacerbated by homophobic measures and the misogynistic, anti-environmentalist rhetoric of U.S. Senator Jesse Helms.
Highlighting sexual and gender diversity, the sculptures rest on a powerful paradox. By playing on tensions between protection and restraint, constraint and freedom, Morelli draws inspiration from medieval armor, torture instruments, and bodily restraint devices associated with institutional settings and fetish culture. The cuirass, designed for protection, is pierced, making the wearer vulnerable. In this way, the artist denounces the perverse effect of state control over bodies. In losing its primary function, the armor transforms into an oppressive cage. The marginalized, stigmatized, and suffering bodies, have vanished, having surrendered under pressure.
As the oppression of LGBTQIA2S+ communities remains a major global issue, and with the right to abortion once again a central topic in the U.S. presidential campaign following the Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, François Morelli’s Body Politic remains tragically relevant.
Virginie Brunet-Asselin
