FRANCK ALASSEUR

Born in Lyon in 1976, Franck Alasseur is a French painter and photographer who has lived and worked in Prague since 2003.

Trained in painting at the École des Beaux-Arts de Saint-Étienne (DNAP) and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Nancy (DNSEP), he developed his artistic practice through two decades of photography before returning to painting in 2021.

This return was not a break, but a shift in the way he approaches light, movement and time.

His paintings are built slowly, through successive layers of colour and matter. Surfaces are covered, erased, scratched, revealed and transformed. Traces of previous gestures remain beneath the final surface, giving each painting a physical memory.There is no predetermined image to reproduce

The painting develops through a process of accumulation and reduction, between control and accident, until the work reaches its own equilibrium.

Rather than representing light, Franck Alasseur constructs it within the surface — through contrasts, transparency, density and the interaction between what is visible and what remains concealed. His restrained use of colour gives particular importance to the physical presence of the canvas. From a distance, the paintings can appear almost silent; closer, their surfaces reveal movement, depth and traces of time.

His photographic practice remains present in this approach. With the series Une demi-seconde, based on long-exposure photography, explored the transformation of movement and light through a fixed duration. Painting extends this investigation into a different kind of time: not the fraction of a second, but the accumulated time of the making of the work.

The resulting paintings are deliberately open. They do not seek to impose a subject or a single interpretation. They offer a space in which perception can move freely.