Franck Eon

“Here, red and blue circles run diagonally across black monochromatic backgrounds. There, they make up the horizontal plane of an area of perspective that projects elements that seem to belong to a reversed architecture. In this case, the way they are cut out from assemblages of painted plywood panels produces an interplay between emptiness and fullness that structures the surface into layers of geometrical elements. The circle – a recurring motif in Franck Eon’s work – can be understood as the metaphor of his approach. The presence of this circularity echoes his conception of painting as a practice always to be restarted, always reworked. The circle is both a loop and an opening. Franck Eon opens up and explores new paths for painting through the processes of repetition and variation, and by constantly returning to his older output. This constant reworking is a way of breaking with the notion of linear evolution advocated by modernism and, in doing so, of freeing his pictorial practice from any formalistic aim. For Franck Eon as for many artists of his generation, abstract painting hasn’t yet reached its apex. Its history carries on but its reactivation is to be achieved through the application of methods of criticism. Abstraction is a field of experimentation that seeks t go beyond the abstraction/figuration divide. In order to reconsider all the possibilities of painting, Franck Eon devises his own system and methods outside of pre-established rules. […]”

Amélie Pironneau, “Franck Eon: les deux réalités de la peinture” (excerpt), Documents d’artistes Nouvelle-Aquitaine, 2011