For more than five decades Francis Limérat has proposed an in-between form of art. Neither painting, nor sculpture or both, the works are deciphered through an undetermined sort of genre. They have been pervaded and nurtured by the history of the twentieth century avant-gardes as they disrupt painting and its planarity as well as sculpture and its assumed monolithic identity. Their hybrid nature rooted in a move towards various types of cultural productions such as Art Brut and Primitive Art allows the works to conjure up some sensitive plasticity which keeps them away from pure formalism.

Limérat’s « space drawings » may hang on the wall very much like paintings, but the few inches distance that is maintained from the wall allows for the shadows to reflect, thus consuming the illusion of perspective.

The linear structures are made of thin painted wooden-sticks composed in random charts, largely orthogonal. The formal strategy at play generates the duality of the surface and the line, of the void and the plane.

A combination of fragile sensitivity and rational geometry is similarly at work in the whole of drawings on paper.