{"id":125019,"date":"2025-09-09T18:17:52","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T16:17:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/?p=125019"},"modified":"2025-09-09T18:17:52","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T16:17:52","slug":"francois-durel-artist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2025\/09\/09\/francois-durel-artist\/","title":{"rendered":"Fran\u00e7ois Durel: What Skin Remembers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I found myself in front of one of Fran\u00e7ois Durel\u2019s sculptures \u2014 a kind of cathedral, constructed not in stone, but in softened metal and hand-stitched leather. It stood tall, quietly monumental, like a remnant of some devotional architecture that had lost its god but kept its structure. Durel spoke of his fascination with Gothic buildings, of their verticality and their promise of transcendence. \u201cWhen the ceiling is high enough,\u201d he said, \u201cour perception of space is altered, like expanded. It produces a sensation of clarity and release, but also a kind of forced humility.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That phrase stayed with me. It became a way of thinking about his entire practice \u2014 not just the sculptures, but the affect they carry, the memory they hold, and the very precise way they refuse the separation between the intimate and the architectural.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fran\u00e7ois Durel, Sealed Cathedral, metal, leather, deconstructed wooden closet part, piano lesson book, cm. 160x70x160.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Fran\u00e7ois Durel was born in 1993 and grew up on a farm in Normandy. The kind of rural childhood that doesn\u2019t appear in art school application essays. \u201cI grew up in the middle of nowhere,\u201d he told me. \u201cThat liminality shaped my sense of reality in ways that allowed me to develop a strong imaginary at a very young age.\u201d Queerness, in that context, wasn\u2019t denied \u2014 it simply didn\u2019t exist in language. \u201cIt was more like an atmospheric absence,\u201d he said. \u201cA sense of watching life unfold from a slight distance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It shows. Durel\u2019s sculptures feel like they come from someone who\u2019s always observed systems \u2014 of power, of gender, of labor \u2014 without quite entering them. Many of his works are made from recovered farming tools, which he wraps in leather, like relics or offerings. \u201cThere\u2019s something intimate in that gesture,\u201d he said. \u201cTaking these symbols of rural masculinity and enclosing them in a material that evokes both protection and desire.\u201d The leather, he adds, is a second skin \u2014 not just covering, but softening, disarming, re-signifying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn\u2019t just about material play. It\u2019s about ontology. By wrapping these tools, Durel removes them from their function and lets them exist in another register \u2014 tactile, erotic, uncertain. Sculpture, here, becomes a site where control and care, violence and tenderness, meet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fran\u00e7ois Durel, Heatbound (detail), 2025, found oil stove, leather, cm. 21 x 137 x 43.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Fran\u00e7ois Durel, The Court’s Fool I (detail), 2025, leather, metal, cm. 175 x 45 x 60.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But it wasn\u2019t until 2013 that something in him shifted irreversibly. During his first year at art school, he visited Pierre Huyghe\u2019s retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. \u201cI stayed in the space for five hours,\u201d he said, \u201cand could\u2019ve stayed five more. That show gave me a sense of freedom I\u2019d never experienced before \u2014 like I could do anything. That there were no limits.\u201d Huyghe\u2019s heterotopias showed him that art could be a space of temporal elasticity \u2014 not representation, but experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Durel\u2019s work, too, resists capture. It doesn\u2019t resolve anything. It accumulates. Even when it flirts with monumentality, it remains ambiguous, permeable. He speaks often of thresholds \u2014 between visibility and concealment, body and object, function and fantasy. His sculptures feel post-minimalist in spirit, not just for their formal rigor, but for their emotional tension. There\u2019s something of Eva Hesse, Paul Thek, even early Bruce Nauman, in the way the body is evoked through pressure, sag, restraint. \u201cI\u2019m drawn to moments where form collapses under the weight of affect,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Installation view, Blue Velvet, Fran\u00e7ois Durel solo booth, Liste Art Fair 2025.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Fran\u00e7ois Durel, Divider II, 2025, found harvesting machine divider, leather, cm. 30 x 217 x 15.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At LISTE, the fair where I saw his latest body of work, Durel presented a group of sculptures based on harvesting machine dividers \u2014 objects used to split fields into rows. He wrapped them in leather and arranged them in a kind of disjointed maze. The result was disorienting but compelling. \u201cI wanted the booth to feel like a landscape of tensions,\u201d he said, \u201cwhere constraint carries an erotic charge, and where the language of utility gets re-routed into memory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walking through it, I didn\u2019t feel instructed. I felt included \u2014 in something physical, yes, but also psychic. The kind of inclusion that doesn\u2019t simplify or decode. The kind that gives just enough space for you to sense what\u2019s there, and what\u2019s been hidden beneath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fran\u00e7ois Durel\u2019s work doesn\u2019t move in straight lines. It circles around things: authority, memory, desire, the body. What he wraps in leather is never just a tool. It\u2019s a threshold \u2014 and maybe also a wound, still breathing under the surface.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tactile, erotic, uncertain. Fran\u00e7ois Durel’s sculpture, becomes a site where control and care, violence and tenderness, meet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125023,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1793],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-to-be-discovered"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125019"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":125161,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125019\/revisions\/125161"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}