Francys Chenier lives and works in St-Alphonse-Rodriguez. The artist's singular interdisciplinary practice consists of seizing the poetry in his everyday life and to then transpose it into a visual material that can be manipulated. This daily poetry, found here and there inside selected works or gleaned books, becomes the initiator of meditative and immersive movements, of a rewriting of Chenier's thought in the cracks of reality.
He is inspired by the legacy of the avant-gardes, particularly Guillaume Apollinaire' calligrammes and Dadaism's deconstruction of language. The artist is also influenced by the modernity of the second half of the 20th century, more specifically by the Fluxus event scores, the typo-manuscript graphic dimension of 1960s and 1970s conceptual art, and the poet Claude Gauvreau's super-rational automatism, known as "explorean writing."
The artist holds a BFA and an MA in interdisciplinary art from Université Laval. He has received three merit-based grants. In addition to several independent and underground projects, his work has recently been presented as part of PERF (Ré)agir / (Re)act, AXENÉO7 (Gatineau, 2021), at the Darling Foundry's Public Square (Montreal, 2019) and in the artist-run centres Arprim (Montreal, 2021) and 3e Impérial (Granby, 2019-2021).
Francys Chenier's works will be part of the exhibition Regards situés which will open on April 27 at 5:00 pm at Centre SAGAMIE.
The exhibition Regards Situés, successively presented at the Centre Skol in Montreal and at the Centre SAGAMIE in Alma, is part of the Inter-Centres/art actuel, circulation et mobilité program, initiated by the Centre SAGAMIE for the visual arts.
This program is supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) in order to encourage and support the circulation of works and artists on the Quebec territory through structuring initiatives such as Centre SAGAMIE's Inter-Centres/art actuel program.
