In many presentations and exhibitions of the Belgian artist Michel François (Sint-Truiden 1956, lives and works in Brussels) the relationship between the work and the space, between the sculpture and the architecture, plays an emphatic role. The link that François establishes between the object and its environment involves more than a mere form of presentation; an intrinsic concept has given direction to all of the work produced by him over the past twenty years. The exhibition Déjà vu at De Pont, his first museum show in the Netherlands, has also been conceived by him as an entity whose parts are interrelated. The point of departure for this was the symmetry provided by the museum’s row of ‘wool-storage’ rooms.
The elements in the exhibition represent a not only diversity of images, forms and materials but also one of experiences and lines of thought. The generation of new meanings for known images and everyday situations is central to the work of Michel François. In doing this he uses a variety of means and media. Art critic Robbert Roos: “(...) the most inconsequential things are given a presentation of monumental proportions. By enlarging them, zooming in on them, cropping them very precisely and arranging them subtly François raises the most ephemeral matters to a expressive level.