Born in 1961, François Désiré is a self-taught artist whose unconventional path reveals the quiet strength of late vocations. Even as a child, he felt an irrepressible need to translate the world into shapes and colors. Nature, objects, landscapes — everything became a pretext for escape and visual reverie. Yet life led him away from that first impulse, until one day in 2005, something shifted. His eldest daughter left home to follow her own path. Time, suddenly, seemed to accelerate. François, in turn, chose to slow down — to refocus and reconnect with his childhood dream: to paint.
His painting, deeply inhabited, draws breath from the great masters of the 20th century, whose formal audacity and expressive power he admires. Nourished by current events, literature, and music, he seeks to convey through his work a message of awakening — to hope, to freedom, to the rediscovery of childhood. A gentle rebellion sometimes finds its way onto his canvases — that of a human being feeling confined in a world too narrow. A longing for flight, for light, for openness.
