EXHIBITION
François roca

French painter and illustrator

François Roca is a French painter and illustrator, born in Lyon in 1971. He studied at the École nationale des arts appliqués Olivier de Serres in Paris, in the ‘image and communication’ section, then at the École Émile-Cohl in Lyon, in illustration.

Roca began his career in the press and publishing industry. In Lyon, he became friends with the comic strip artist Fred Bernard, whose texts he illustrated for over twenty years. In 1996 they published La Reine des fourmis a disparu, which won the Prix Sorcières, the Prix Alphonse Daudet and the Prix Jérôme Main. Such success encouraged them to explore themes rarely tackled in children's publishing and to build imaginary worlds that were renewed with each album, notably by Albin Michel and Editions du Seuil. Roca paints fantastic settings populated by conquistadors, little ballet dancers, trunk automatons, artist ogres and fairytale heroines.

In his paintings, Roca portrays solitary, mysterious women whose cold, determined beauty evokes the heroines of Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch. Influenced by noir novels and the aestheticism of American films from the 1950s, he sketches his models in old-fashioned interiors or American road movie settings. ‘To paint is to conjure up an image that is not that of the natural appearance of things, but which has the force of reality’, according to Raoul Dufy. It is this force of reality that is characteristic of Roca's art.

His canvases are painted in oil. With a disturbing realism and great sensuality, they capture the power of women's bodies, the translucence of their skin, the shape of their lips, the detail of their hairstyles. They brilliantly reinterpret the melancholy settings of Edward Hopper and the chiaroscuro atmospheres of the classical masters. Roca was appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2017. He has taken part in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world.