François Mendras employs the most classic of techniques, wax on wood, but with a variety of processes that aim at juxtaposing work evincing a mastery of the art of painting with another type of work, one that is more naïve and displays feigned clumsiness. Fa presto, simplified realism and deflected intention characterize the deliberate heterogeneity and ambiguity of the picture’s apparent aim. Basic rigorous geometric shapes from constructivist art or lyrical abstraction, from the Gothic and from the contemporary, are disoriented by facetious representations borrowed from comic books and fairytales. In the cleavage between major and minor styles, and in the mixing of genres, the work of art takes shape at the crossroads of quotations, where so many references without obvious coherent ties jostle together: symmetry and its sudden interruption, treatment of subjects and backgrounds, color and black-and-white, horizontal and vertical, the field of the mythic and the banal.(…) Intermingling the abstract and the figurative, the physical and the metaphysical, decorative elements and the subject, gestural painting and large areas of uniform color, these interwoven registers cover over with a camouflaged weft any interpretation having a calculated finality. You could say that this painting is in itself a cultural exception that draws on the fund of collective intuition. Images escape from a mental pigment that is originally unfathomable. There’s nothing here suggesting the pixel surface; rather it’s a kind of ludicrous dread that steals away from the pictorial material and clings to our imprisoned memories. Frédéric Bouglé