François-Xavier Delmeire

François-Xavier Delmeire is a lover of images. He was born in 1971 in Mouscron, where he tended a bookshop specialized in graphic novels for over twenty years. Already an artist then, he would delve into the pleasures of collage and montage.

Raised to the rank of Art by the 20th century Avant-Garde, collage is inseparable from the Surrealist movement. The ultimate expression of irreverence, the practice cultivates discrepancies and détournement. Collage not only attempts to displace reality, but to create it, giving substance to hitherto unseen aesthetic and intellectual experiences.

Faced with the flood of contemporary images, François-Xavier Delmeire’s work falls under the scope of fond experimentations – quests for freedom conducive to humor and to the subtlest reflections. His mosaic-like works are deviations from images and words which recompose a language instilled with poetry and sensitivity.

«(…)François-Xavier Delmeire (…) breathes the unexpected into collage and montage. There is no such thing as time in collage, whether in terms of its creation or of its ingredients. Recent ads echo faded engravings, colored postcards meet early illustrated magazines exhumed in the early hours from second-hand shoe boxes. Nor is there any sense of hierarchy, for that matter - under his scissors, a model is well worth the Mona Lisa, fountain nibs trump ballpoint pens, as the past takes its revenge on a declined present. « Xavier Cannone