François
Dilasser

François Dilasser (1926-2012) always lived and worked in Lesneven, a small town in Brittany. He learnt his craft by way of his tutelary figures, Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, Gauguin and Klee, but also, and above all, Bissière, whose secret disciple he was. Like him, he was suspicious of the dazzle and shine of oil, and preferred the matt tones of acrylic, through which, by way of snippets and involuntary devotions, he found Giotto, Uccello, Sassetta and Lorenzetti, with their planes and their triangulated perspectives, as described byAntoinette Dilasser, witness and chronicler of François’s oeuvre.
“I never start out directly from reality, even if I sometimes realize after the fact that such and such a form tallies with things that I’ve recorded. It’s always a form which comes forth, and then all sorts of variations happen to it… It may conjure up a still life, or become like landscape, or a human shape. This is probably why I sometimes give no title to my pictures, so that this form can carry on shifting from one meaning to the next…
I sketch in pencil without thinking of anything, I try to leave my hand free. I don’t want anything, I try to discover something I don’t know… little by little an idea or rather a form emerges…I don’t name it, I feel it is living. There are moments when I know it: it is there.”

F. Dilasser in A. Dilasser, D.,Le temps qu’il fait, 2003.