Biography
François Malingrëy, is a contemporary painter born in 1989 from a press cartoonist father, he starts his artistic career with illustration before devoting himself to painting and sculpture. Originally from Nancy, he now lives and works in Paris after studying at the Beaux-Arts d’Epinal and the Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg. His work is based on the human being that he represents in a very personal, strange atmosphere, both tragic and poetic, raw and restrained.
“I want to represent human almost archetypal states.
Depersonalized men and women, often stripped but never entirely, whose flesh he works more than the charm of the nude, are presented in neutral environments with a heavy atmosphere. The atmosphere is melancholic, even silent, supported by the use of muted tones with restricted chromaticism, contrasted with the light that emerges from the model’s skin. The model is studied and presented from different angles in archetypal states in order to dilute his personality. It is also impossible to fix his gaze, both fixed and blurred, as if he were immersed in his thoughts, giving off a feeling of unease. And it is exactly this feeling that the artist wants to transmit more than a real representation. However, his painting is figurative but, as with Hopper or Lucian Freud, it is the atmosphere of the work and its strangeness that hold the viewer and take his breath away, more than the beauty of the figure represented.
“Figuration allows us to consider the world in a much broader way than it is.
François Malingrëy created a surprise in 2015 at the Salon de Montrouge, where his works stood out among the digital creations and diverted objects presented by artists of his generation. Beyond the narrative side of his work, it is the mastery of the issues and plastic tools that remain us. Each work is an upheaval: between drama and tranquility, banality and strangeness, calm and tension, his shady characters, portrayed in a polished but neutral setting, form a human gallery that is both simple and complex, and with which we cannot identify. It is through this depersonalization of the model and his technical mastery that Malingrëy takes us into his universe, so strong and assertive for an artist barely 30 years old.
“In my painting, I am very attached to telling stories… but without ever being in a story too obvious “.
