François Réau

François Réau (b. 1978, Niort, France) takes the space of the landscape and its processes of transformation as a starting point in his work. Drawing on his fascination with nature as well as literary, artistic, scientific and historical references, his drawings, paintings and installations examine the relationship between human beings and natural forms. Réau draws out the connections between mental and physical landscapes, as well as notions of scale, perception and the ways in which forms emerge and dissolve. The landscape becomes a site of projection and passage, a space shaped as much by human desire as by the physical world. As the artist puts it, ‘the landscape is always, in a certain way, the expression of absence, because the space of the landscape is also the very space of our own desire.’

Réau seeks to push the boundaries of drawing through immersive devices, allowing the medium to escape its traditional support and occupy space, turning it into a place for the experience of visual thought. His installations create a dialogue between dream and reality, becoming at times poetic metaphors or refuges of intimate, sensory worlds, offering the viewer the potential for re-enchantment. Paintings mark a new chapter in Réau’s practice and were shown in his first presentation with Waddington Custot, Paris and London, in the group exhibition The Nabi Shock. In oil, the tones of the landscape and its foliage are rendered through textured oil paint built up in hatched lines. For Réau, painting is the site of an experience of time, where each layer preserves the memory of gesture. 

Educated at Ecole Régionale des Beaux-Arts in Poitiers, then at the Ecole d’Arts Appliqués in Poitiers (graduating in 2001), Réau has since participated in various international events and has exhibited widely. He was a finalist for the ‘Talents Contemporains’ prize at the François Schneider Foundation in Wattwiller in 2015 and 2016 and has been awarded multiple residencies. He was most recently a resident fellow for research and creation at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid (2025–2026), taking inspiration from Diego Velázquez’s treatment of landscape to examine the relationship between historical imagery and the contemporary Spanish landscape.

His recent solo presentations include Dans les plis de l’horizon, a series of exhibitions spread across five emblematic sites in the Amiens area of France, creating a dialogue between the history of the region, a former Spanish territory until the end of the 16th century, and Spain. In 2023 he presented Resolutio at the Abbaye Saint-Sauveur de Charroux, Charroux, France, and, in 2022, Le ciel, grand, plein de retenue splendide at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan, France. Other notable solo exhibitions took place at the Musée Saint-Roch, Issoudun, France; the Fondation Bullukian, Lyon, France; the Drawing Lab, Paris; the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud, Saumur, France; the Eleven Steens, Brussels; and the Alliance Française, Melbourne. In 2021, the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, France, invited Réau to experiment with very large formats, resulting in Nuages, a drawing measuring over fifteen meters in length. That same year, in collaboration with the Fondation Bullukian for the 15th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, he produced a monumental textile work stretching sixty meters.

Réau’s works are held in several collections, including FRAC Alsace, Sélestat, France; Musée Saint-Roch, Issoudun, France; Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud, Fontevraud, France; Fondation Bullukian, Lyon, France; Fondation Pascaline Mulliez, France; SMAK, Ghent, Belgium; and the Musée Jenisch, Vevey, Switzerland. 

François Réau lives and works in Paris and is represented worldwide by Waddington Custot.