Liberal translation of artistic critic of François Ruy-Vidal

In spite of his candid outward appearance, behind the clear look of Francis Puivif lies an ardent curiosity combined with the intuition of a down to earth and simple man, making him seem almost shy when first met. But once one know him, and then understand his motivations, his unshakable commitment in the trade, the ingenious originality of his combinations obliges one to discover the extreme rigour in his progression from his desire to conceive to the result of a final project. One is then forced to admit his very determined will to achieve, in the most precise details, his ideas.

His expertise is that of a meticulous artisan, a kind of pragmatism at the service of a concrete aestheticism, rooted between the conceptual and the perpetual naïve and rough art, intensely illuminated by the colours of Pop’Art and the liberal formations, often in three dimensions, in a percussive realism.

The juxtaposition of acid colours in his production of megalopolis ruffled with gleaming skyscrapers is counterbalanced by the muffled harmony of other creations artificially aged, where disarticulated violins and exploded keyboards freeze on music scores and seem to continue to mark the rhythm silently of the dramatic notes of the Mahler symphonies for the deaf and blind people we are.

With no doubt neither the clear look nor the calm smile of Francis Puivif can make one forget the interior irruption, the subversive explosion, and the crashes of these vehicles smashing the canvas with their crazy trajectories.

The artist and his work come from our times without nostalgia. To place him, even if one recalls the formalism of the artistic schools, the brutal revealing force of Arman or the politico-social patchworks in the collages of Erro’, one finally realises that in is quest Francis Puivif sources his inspiration with some decades less, from that civilisation, ours, that of an urbanised concentration, of over-information, of the over-wrapping of an outrageous marketing and also that of mega-festivities: love and techno parades, gay prides and rave parties…, festivities of a youth dancing from one foot to another between awareness and its desire to flee and forget all.

However in the background appears the unexpressed, like a presence suggested by a lack of identity, a shadow that gives the relief and a readable meaning: this other unreachable civilisation, the one that is conscious of the dangers the first one generates: pollution, disappearing species, deforestation…. forgery of mass media adding themselves to all these trivial expenses and multiple squandering that increase our uneasiness and the extreme poverty in the world.

Look attentively at Francis Puivif’s paintings and sculptures and I am sure you will find, as I did, in the filigree the inside wound of a sensitive artist, wound that is expressed as a modest testimony, a kind of protest against the obsessive progress of the fierce globalization.