Press RElease

French's work is informed by a deep engagement with Baroque forms. The fragment, the ruin and dynamically twisted shapes permeate his entire oeuvre, which is a kind of grand theater of psychosexual anthropomorphisms. The seamless fabrication of his sculptures echoes the Baroque fascination with virtuosity while his choice of synthetic golds, royal purples and saturated reds allude to the power of inorganic objects and class politics.

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Implicit in French's folding and curvilinear shapes is a different kind of story about the base matter of creation and the play of creative contingency. The spiky abstractions of blowfish-like forms, swirling organic motifs and hard earthen topologies all hold equal sway in French's art practice. Over the last few years however, he has become more engaged with the rhetorical devices of prestige. In such a move, the formal aspects of Baroque aesthetics are married to the politics of the present by evoking the privilege accorded to high-end commodity forms. Some of French's most recent works have made use of rapid prototyping techniques that create the feel of a techno-Baroque aesthetic, or what the theorist Norman Klein calls an Electronic Baroque that evades all traces of the human touch.

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This shift in French's work charts a path that is as much about the evolution of forms as it is the politics of cultural production. Caught between seduction and simulation, his works point to a history of forms and colors that take as much from pre- and post-modern art as they do the ethos of high modernism. By combining computational and industrial fabrication techniques with a radical sensualism, French's work makes us rethink the potential of material embodiment in a way that is as rare as it is beautiful.