Internet: Michel Francois, born in 1956 in Saint-Trond (Belgium) has participated in the Venice Biennial (1999), in Documenta 9, Kassel (1992) and has shown his work at many solo and group shows around the world. The Institut d'art contemporain presented Plans d'evasion, the first large monographic exhibition of Michel Francois' work produced jointly with the S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst), Ghent. This collaboration between the S.M.A.K. and the IAC shows their common interest in monographic exhibitions, that is to say directly with the artist, providing him with the space, the time and the means to show work in all its complexity. It also allowed the publication of the first retrospective catalogue of the artist's work, an occasion to take full measure of what he has done since the 1980s. Symmetry is a fundamental element in the relation between Michel Francois and the two exhibition spaces. At the Institute, he uses this feature while readapting the presentation of works and by making new ones. As always with Michel Francois, the exhibition is designed using recycling as the operating method. A fundamental practice in his work, sculpture covers photography, video, installations as well as performance to address issues of space, volume and balance that determine representation, whatever the medium used. Recurrent preoccupations emerge from the heart of this proliferating, surging work: living material in all its forms (insertion of plant life, representation of mineral features, human gestures, etc.), the ordering of forces (gravity, balance, resistance"¦) and the metaphor of imprisonment and everything that it induces (breakage, holes, escape "¦). Michel Francois' objects, images and volumes ceaselessly change and bond, a replay of a growing natural process, and become transitory forms. The works thus seem as if frozen in an expansion of forms and meanings. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.