François Dehoux probes. With meticulousness, he feels the ground to make a sensitive and even carnal experience. He delights in delving into this matrix, bringing to light through his works what he perceives from the other side, the surface. By disturbing the subterranean world, he rubs the invisible with his phalanges and his nails. His production follows a principle of extraction, extracting forms from the depths towards the light. The revealing impulse is to be compared to the photographic process. Under the sun, time and space offer themselves to him malleable, to better shape them according to the roots he will meet. And although he wanders a lot, this relationship to the ground determines a logic to always anchor the making of these sculptures somewhere. When he stops, he digs. His biography bears witness to odysseys that have taken him around the country, a tour of France driven by an appetite to learn by doing. He thus trained in stonemasonry in the Drôme, masonry in the Haute-Loire, carpentries in the Maurienne, market gardening in the Sologne, shoemaking in the Loire, organic goat breeding in the Jura, and cow breeding in the Ardèche and then in Switzerland, as well as landscaping in the Haute-Savoie, not to mention the many construction sites in the mountains and valleys. Today, his artistic activity is based on these manual professions, framed by an academic curriculum in applied arts first, and then visual arts, which he found necessary to emancipate himself from simple execution. All this awakens certain Arts & Crafts passions in the service of the beautiful gesture. With the fascination for the capital progress in less. Because François Dehoux sometimes prefers to turn his back on human things. And after making his hole, just before leaving, he plants a few seeds. This will make us parsley, chervil and carrots.

Joël Riff, 2020
written for solo show Apiaks, based on work during Moly Sabata art residence