François Thevenet (b. 1993) is a French painter based in Barcelona working primarily with oil paint. His practice exists in the space between figuration and abstraction. Beginning with simple motifs—portraits, flowers, dogs or everyday forms—he uses representation as a framework for painting rather than an end in itself. Images emerge through layers of gestures, erasures and shifting colour, remaining suspended between recognition and dissolution.

«I paint figurative subjects with the logic of abstraction. The portrait is not my destination but my startingpoint—an excuse to paint. Rather than describing a person, I am interested in what happens to an image while it is being painted. Through expressive brushwork, scraping, erasure and accumulation, figures appear, disappear and re-emerge. I look for the moment when an image feels alive precisely because it remains unstable, balancing between depiction and pure painting.»