Denis Defrancesco is a French artist born on 28 June 1954, in Bédarieux in

the Hérault region. He lives and works between Prague, Budapest and

Aix-en-Provence.

 

A Multifaceted Artist

Self-taught, atypical, and iconoclastic, Denis Defrancesco uses a whole range of

techniques and materials to give form to his ideas, fantasies, and anxieties.

A great ape in bronze, a giant plexiglass rabbit, a blow-up doll made of marble,

a plastic Obama, a steel machine for slicing memories, a urinal in oil paint...

He keeps giving the world his own twist, transfiguring reality to tell us stories:

a childhood fear, a teenage memory, a passionate love affair, time fleeting, the body declining, death lurking.

It is pop, electric, often bold, and always free.

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His work, both carnal and scientific, blends bronze with marble, paint with

plexiglass, steel with plastic. He likes nothing more than mixing genres and

spurning styles.

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Denis Defrancesco is an exalted introvert, an exhibitionist full of modesty, who

createsan eclectic, surprising, insolent, and personal body of work with his monumental sculptures, 3-D paintings, and  metamorphosised idols.

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A text accompanies each of his sculptures and paintings, like the key to a specific

story.

The Sequel to the Story

During 35 years, Denis Defrancesco photographed “Woman with a capital W”… Actually, thousands of women, for the most

prestigious French and international adult and glamour magazines. His “eye” and his reputation as a “creator of worlds” took

him to London, New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, Sydney, and Tokyo.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Denis was the first western photographer to “go East”, to help the world discover the most beautiful

models from Central Europe. Living in Budapest, in the early 1990s, he joined the digital revolution in its early stages, adapting

his reflex camera and studios to the web. Very soon, his websites became the most coveted on the net.

 

The Sequel of the Sequel to the Story

For all these years, Denis Defrancesco has never stopped drawing, making plans, project models, collages, and experimenting with

forms and volumes: “Everything I loved to do as a child,” he explains. Years of secretive, almost alchemical work that has now come

of age. The start of a corpus that Denis Defrancesco has now decided to present.

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His First Exhibition

At the GAA Foundation, in Venice, during the 2017 Viva Arte Viva Biennial. The most striking collateral event of the festival, according

to the organisers.