Textes

 

Draft of a Self-Portrait

François wrote very little about his work. This silence was not a matter of modesty, but a choice. He considered that everything he had to say was already contained within the forms, the relationships, and the dissonances of his work. Writing would have meant adding a superfluous layer. Verbalizing would have meant beginning to confine.
And yet, he did leave behind a brief note — a sentence, almost administrative in tone, that stands as a hidden manifesto:
“Brief presentation of my work: Relief engraving and white-line engraving. This ancient and simple technique allows me to approach the History of Art as well as contemporary art in an illustrative manner. Generally, I work on series that include text. The piece presented is more a research on the technique itself, with landscape as its subject.”
It is little. And yet it is a great deal. For everything is already there: technique, the History of Art, the series, the text, the landscape. But in a minimal form, almost subtracted from itself.
When he says "illustrate the History of Art," he does not use the word lightly. He chooses it for its double meaning: to illustrate is to depict, but also to exemplify. It is to point toward a history already present, to prolong it through a hollow. For François, this history becomes raw material: no longer context, but content. He engraves the History of Art itself — not its works, but its remains, its images, its ghosts.
One could evoke here Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, or Thomas Struth: artists of the 1980s and 1990s who question art through its representations, its modes of exhibition, its discourses.
But where these artists often proceed through photography or installation, François chooses engraving — the slow medium — to take back by hand what art projects as an image.
When he says that "the piece presented is a research on the technique itself," he quietly asserts another ambition: engraving as a reflexive gesture, as a way to retell oneself, to rethink oneself. Technique becomes the subject. No longer merely a means of producing an image, but a mental material to explore, to experience, to circumvent.
This small text, one of the few he wrote about his work, is anything but incidental. It is an elliptical self-portrait. It speaks by not speaking. It traces a contour without filling the center. It does exactly what his engravings do: it leaves the other free to interpret, to inhabit, to continue.
And that is exactly what we are about to do.

Simplicity of Means

There is in the engraved work of François Joseph Chabrillat a clear will toward reduction. Not a form of impoverishment, but a return to the elemental conditions of the artistic gesture. François dislikes technical intermediation. He distrusts machines, interfaces, and the constraining paths of technology. He needs an immediate, primal practice.
This requirement is not theorized — it is embodied, vital. It already places him at odds with the grand and costly apparatus of certain contemporary productions. He works with what he has at hand, literally.
Yet this desire for spontaneity clashes with an obvious contradiction: engraving, by definition, is a technical, prepared, mediated art. It is the art of the matrix, of transfer, of repetition. François knows this perfectly — and it is within this tension that his practice takes shape. He does not deny the technicality of engraving; he reduces it to the bone.
His method: no press, no acid, no copper. Just cardboard, a cutter, his feet. The only remaining traditional tools: the roller and the transparent white lacquer, which he enriches with pigments. Everything else belongs to an economy of pure gesture.
This economy is not a sign of insufficiency: it is a radical choice. He works directly on the ground, using his own weight. He stands on his matrices, literally, to extract an imprint. The image is born from physical contact, without mechanical mediation.

See the "Technique" page

Text and Image

In the work of François Joseph Chabrillat, text is never a pretext. It does not accompany the image. It does not explain it. And yet it is always there, engraved, printed. The relationship between text and image lies at the heart of his practice — but it is a relationship of equality, of plastic coexistence, not of subordination.
His work inscribes itself within an ancient tradition: that of engraving as a vehicle for text, as a tool of illustration. From the incunabula to the artist's books of the twentieth century, engraving has often been used to give visual form to stories, poems, literary visions.
But very quickly, in his hands, this relationship reverses itself.
François considers text as an image in its own right. Each word, each letter, each space becomes graphic material, an integral part of the composition. It is not merely about reading the text, but about seeing it — in its form, its density, its rhythm.
He does not illustrate texts. He engraves words as he engraves forms, with the same intensity, the same plastic demand. He inscribes himself here into a history of text-image relationships that extends from illuminated manuscripts to humanist emblems, calligrams, Lettrism, and certain contemporary practices such as those of Cy Twombly, Barbara Kruger, or Jenny Holzer.
But with him, this image-text is never demonstrative. It is mental matter. It is the abstract double of the figurative image.
Text and image do not mirror each other. They do not explain one another. They coexist — sometimes in conflict. It is a tense co-presence, where one disturbs the reading of the other, without ever extinguishing it.
One does not understand the image through the text, nor the text through the image. But their conjunction creates a field of resonance, a shifting space of interpretation. François places the viewer in a state of latency: one must look, read, reread, return — just as, when we were children, we gazed at writing before we had learned how to read.

Sources and Their Use

In his engravings, François draws from images sourced from contemporary art — but reproduced ones. They come from photographs in catalogs, specialized art magazines, or pages from the internet. These are not artworks seen, experienced, or physically confronted — but reduced imprints, flattened, filtered through the lens of mediation.
From inspiration to realization, it is therefore an art of reproduction, not of direct experience. A gaze directed toward what contemporary art projects as an image, rather than the artwork itself. An aesthetic of distance, of surface, of the spectral. There is in him a fascination for everything that contemporary art represents — and for the way it is represented. This distancing becomes, for him, a material in itself.
Associated with these images are fragments of text. Often drawn from German literature — whether children's tales, popular narratives, or classical works — such as Karl May, Der Struwwelpeter, Hansel and Gretel; but also sometimes from English literature, such as Joseph Conrad. Texts chosen with care, almost always for their cruelty, their strangeness, their ambivalence.
Yet, it is never a relationship of illustration. François does not seek concord between the visual and the verbal. It is a cold collision. A deliberate tension. He refuses the classical model of the commented image or the staged text.
At times, one might believe that the text is treated as neutral matter — a mere aesthetic filler, like the lorem ipsum of printers. But it is not so. Each excerpt is chosen for its resonance: intimate, moral, historical. These texts are not critical alibis. They are charges, detonators.
There lies an implicit critique of criticism itself. François spends hours poring over exhibition catalogs and art magazines, where reproductions of artworks are systematically accompanied by theoretical texts. He absorbs this form — the association of a reproduced image with a critical commentary — only to subvert it. In his engravings, he adopts this very device, but in place of the scholarly discourse, he substitutes fragments of literature.
He knows that any text juxtaposed with any image inevitably produces an effect of meaning. But he does not settle for that. He seeks a precise tension, a deliberate friction. There is nothing surrealist about his associations: they are never arbitrary. They are long meditated.
In his work, text and image do not correspond. They confront each other. And from that confrontation arises a third term: a disturbance, a vertigo, a question left open.

What I Believe I Can Say About His Work

We knew each other for more than fifty years. High school, art school, joint exhibitions. An immediate friendship, tested over the years, across distances and reunions. And today, I attempt to say something — not in his name, but based on what I have seen, heard, felt, and shared.
We have seen that François spent endless hours reading, watching, and gathering images of contemporary art. He had built for himself, like Aby Warburg, his own "Mnemosyne," and what he contemplated was not the work itself: it was its reproduction. Not the object in space, but its printed trace. At the beginning of his artistic journey, his isolation — far from the centers of contemporary art — compelled him to this intensive use of printed images. He made it a strength.
This obsession with reproduction often made me think of Walter Benjamin:
"What withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of art is its aura."
François, for his part, seemed to say: so much the better. What he loved was the absent aura — even the negative aura. The image that promised but never delivered.The one that suggested more than it showed. He dreamed through the works. He lent them a potential that the real object sometimes disappointed. It was not cynicism. It was a way of taking possession of a desired object in his own manner. A faith in the indirect gaze.
François, then, nourished himself with images, not only by necessity, but above all for the drift they allowed. Their incompleteness, their degradation, their detachment from the original work became so many springboards for the imagination: he dreamed from these reflections, he rebuilt a world of art on his own terms.
But in a second movement, what he harvested from these reproductions, he engraved, he materialized anew. Through the thick matter of his prints, through the slow gesture of engraving, he restored to these lost images a sensitive presence, an inscription in space and in time. Although his engravings were multiples, their extremely limited edition — five to ten copies at most — gave each series a tangible uniqueness.
Thus François, paradoxically, gave back an aura to what had lost it. In his own way, he offered a new dignity to the reflections on the wall of Plato’s cave: not by pretending to retrieve the original, but by embracing the beauty of the reflection, and giving back to it its intelligible thickness. He was no idealist.
And then, as we have seen, there was his ambiguous relationship with art discourse. He had a certain admiration for these discourses; he read many critical texts. But on the other hand — for François was not a simple man — he also loved to detest them.François thought he could, more efficiently, replace the often laborious critical commentaries with texts he appreciated for the cruel resonances they produced in him.
Now that the framework of his work is in place — images, texts, reproductions — it becomes possible to add flesh to it.
François had a particular relationship with childhood, with its innocent cruelty, with the birth of guilt when that innocence fades into adulthood. One example might shed light on this relationship: he had chosen Winnetou by Karl May because he had read somewhere that it was one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite books. Cruel innocence. This was the foundation of most of his choices of texts: innocence and cruelty — Hansel and Gretel, Der Struwwelpeter...
His humor was very dark; he loved to wield sarcasm, especially when appearances of innocence, purity, or morality were at stake. He spared no one and nothing escaped his eye. He could attribute to the most candid souls the darkest or most perverse intentions — and he did so with a ferocity so funny, so gleeful, that it would make us weep with laughter.
He carefully chose the exhibition images he would reproduce according to this orientation.He selected contemporary artworks where he could discern — or believed he could discern — this confrontation of innocence and cruelty, but also cynicism, manipulation, and the reification of beings and ideas. Sometimes it was pertinent, sometimes more distant, but he did not fear the margins of interpretation. He made of these diverted images what he wanted.
To do full justice to François, I must say that sometimes his armor of caustic irony would crack, letting through a spontaneous, intact childlike spirit.
His engraving is the fulfillment of that nostalgia for an absolute innocence, freed from all guilt.

What Remains Open

Everything I have tried to write here — and everything others might one day say — is not meant to exhaust François' work. That has never been the goal. One cannot close an oeuvre like his.One can only approach it, through fragments, through crossings, through intuitions. He did not believe in keys, nor in ready-made grids of interpretation. He mistrusted those who spoke too quickly. He preferred doubt, reserve, the oblique gaze.
His engravings say nothing univocal. They pose. They oppose. They juxtapose. They do not resolve. They let things be sensed.They demand from the viewer an effort of listening — not a reading, not a demonstration, but a presence.
There is no "right" or "wrong" interpretation of a work like his. There is only what each person sees there, feels there, confronts there. What each person brings — from themselves, from their past, from their fears, from their questions.
And that, ultimately, is what makes a work endure: its capacity to resist closure, its way of existing outside its author, its power to continue generating meaning without ever fixing it.
François did not wish to create "a work." He wanted to leave a trace. A human trace, engraved, fragile, tenuous, but insistent. A trace that each of us might follow for a while, before turning away.
I believe it has been done.