Exhibition

Le Temps S'écoute | Peter de Francia

20 Jan 2017 – 17 Mar 2017

Regular hours

Friday
10:00 – 17:00
Tuesday
10:00 – 17:00
Wednesday
10:00 – 17:00
Thursday
10:00 – 17:00

Save Event: Le Temps S'écoute | Peter de Francia5

I've seen this2

People who have saved this event:

close

ASC Gallery

London
United Kingdom, United Kingdom

Address

Directions via Google Maps Directions via Citymapper
Event map

An exhibition based on objects and images from the home of the late Peter de Francia.

About

In the month when Peter de Francia would have turned 96, five years after his death, ASC Gallery is proud to present an exhibition to celebrate his life and work.

Its title, ‘Le temps s’écoute’, refers to a quotation he kept pinned above his writing table. Its origin is uncertain: the literal translation, “time listens to itself”, does not convey its full meaning, which echoes in the imagination.

For over 50 years until his death a few days before his 91st birthday, de Francia lived and worked a few hundred yards from the ASC Gallery’s present site in Thurlow Street. In his house, room for drawing and painting took precedence; he had no interest in mod cons, and enjoyed a simple style of life.

The focus of the exhibition is not primarily on the artist’s work, but on the objects and images that surrounded him at home: photographs from magazines and newspapers, Indian wind-up toys, mementoes of his beloved Provence. There is a playfulness and humour in the juxtaposition of image and object, visual puns in the image of a rotund belly is echoed by the curve of a clay pot, or the dialogue between the proud sweep of the spout of a jug and a surging uniformed paunch. Only occasionally is there a direct reference to his own work, but every object speaks of him, and conveys a strong sense of the artist’s personality.

The blue ground of the exhibition’s display cabinets alludes to de Francia’s bleu de travail, the blue cotton French worker’s jacket and trousers that he often wore. A friend tells the story that he was once accosted by an old lady at the Gare St Lazare, who mistook him for a porter, and demanded he carry her luggage. He complied, of course.

Born and brought up in France, an art student in Belgium, living for a time in Rome, de Francia was an intellectual in the French sense, profoundly European, “cosmopolitan by conviction”, to quote Dore Ashton. He exhibited widely, not only in the UK and Europe but also in the United States and India. (His portraits of the 50s and 60s present a wide -ranging array of figures, across disciplines, such as the historian Eric Hobsbawm, the composer Alexander Goehr, the scientist J. D. Bernal, and the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo.)

Throughout his life de Francia was committed to the figurative language of painting, at a time when abstraction and conceptual art were in the ascendant, and figuration had become deeply unfashionable. “Art for art’s sake” was not what interested him; his subject was the human condition, in all its aspects: the horrors of bombings, massacres, executions, the plight of migrants, the abuse of power, alongside the tenderness and intimacy of human relationships. In later years, he turned to metaphor, allegory and myth.

He was an influential teacher, at St Martin’s School of Art, as Head of Fine Art at Goldsmiths, and finally as Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art, from 1972 to 1986.

-

Alongside the exhibition, 3 Italian Neo –Realist films important to Peter will be shown. 
The film events are open to all but numbers will be limited.

Wednesday 8 February | 6-8pm – “Salvatore Guiliano” by Francesco Rosi.
Wednesday 22 February | 6-8pm – “Rome, Open City” by Roberto Rossellini
Wednesday 8 March | 6-8pm –“The Bicycle Thieves” by Vittorio de Sica

CuratorsToggle

Darren O'Brien

Christina Niederberger

Alix MacSweeney

Related events

Comments

Have you been to this event? Share your insights and give it a review below.