HALLU

Already six years have past since Lumen Travo presented a solo show of Michel François. About a year ago the gallery presented a unique double show of Michel François and Meschac Gaba, in which the various works, a couple of them shown in showcases of glass and wood, were really made by both of them together making it impossible to distinguish their individual input. One of the most striking features of François's oeuvre is the absolutely peculiar and convincing way with which he knows to visualise and even make sensible a sensual tactility, without ever having to touch the works themselfs. This aspect also defines an important part of the power of his photography: the images seem to make a direct link to our sense of touch but also to te other senses. A child playing with a ball, a knot in a sweater at the height of the abdomen, a cactus, a hand holding a big piece of soap. But this tactility, or rather this hard-to-get-a-grip-on in both literal and metaphorical sense, is only one of the means François is using to tingle the visitor. His work is more complex than these teasing blows at our senses. We'll find here various dichotomies like concentratie versus fluidity, knots and dénouement, movement and stagnation, individual and group. In his installations which often is a multi-media presentation: photography, video, three dimensional forms and structures, François shows us among others objects recognizably having their origin in the reality surrounding us, like bottles, ropes, a piece of soap, but mostly these objects have lost their original function, because the artist has transformed them in some way: a plant is completely covered with small white styrofoam beads, a strip light is broken in the middle into dangerously sharp splinters of glass, a nice white rope is partly disentangled. All of this adds to a poetic quality of elusiveness of an François installation, aside from - in some way - its abstract quality. His photographs present us with images reproducing reality itself, but the chosen image always has more than one layer. A tree-trunk has eyes, another one resembles a deceased prehistorical animal a lot.

'Hallu' is the title of a short, but endlesly repeated double-video - we can see two identical projections next to each other- of the hands of the artist playing with a crumpled piece of alluminiumfoil, constantly changing it into various forms which stimulatie the viewer's imagination. The forms, resembling Rorschah inkt spots used at psychological investigations to trigger the subconcious of the examinee, look like a head of some animal at one time, or at the interior of a pelvis at another time. The succession of changing forms is presented rather rapidly, so that our brains hardly get the change to interprete the appearing image thoroughly, for in the meantime an other form is showing itself on the sreen, appealing to our urge to categorize it. 'Hallu' is not without reason a title with a double meaning, referring to the material used and the hallucinating effects of the doubble video. The projection is done through a curtain of transparant plastic strips. This results in a reflection, an iridescent play of light at the wall at the back, enhancing the hallucinating effect.

François wants to break through rigid frames. A room in a museum space arranged by the artist will no more look like a traditional museum space. The artist refers to the concept of rhizome, introduced by the French philosopher Deleuze: not the straight or hierarchic rootsystem of the world of plants, but the endlesly complex, interlinked non-hierarchic underground ramifications of fungi are points of reference. And like a Rorschah spot François's work poli-interpretable, becoming an instrument which gives our imagination enough grip to flourish, to generate our own images and to tempt our subconscious.