2017 — 135 pages — 140 × 200 mm (closed)
publisher: cadastre8zéro
This book, “Dire ou ne dire”, is built from fragments of autobiographical material. Three parts – Itinéraire, Noms de personnes, Abécédaire – evoke and interlace the artist’s childhood memories of Montpellier, the story of his parents, François and Marguerite Rouan, and his first apprenticeships and significant encounters.
Published in January 2017 (publisher’s website)
2015 — 208 pages — 300 × 240 mm (closed)
Fondation Château de Hautefort and Somogy éditions d’Art
Ô saisons, ô châteaux has been published on the occasion of two joint exhibitions: “Sienne, aux origines de la Renaissance” at the fine art gallery of Rouen (France) and “François Rouan à Hautefort”. The artist compares the work he did when he was in Siena (Italy) (1974-75), exhibited at Rouen, and the recent work (painting, drawing, photographing and video-making) displayed at the castle of Hautefort.
Texts by: Sylvain Amic, Dominique Cordellier, Bernard Noël and Jacques Moulin.
Upon this publication, François Rouan also made a short film entitled Un Printemps à Sienne, which has been shown during the exhibition at the fine art gallery in Rouen.
2014 — 80 pages — 220 × 145 mm
Cadastre8zéro Éditeur and Éditions Trois Cailloux
Trotteuses was published to mark the opening of an eponymously titled exhibition held at the ‘Maison de la Culture’ in Amiens. The published volume brings together a text by François Rouan, written in tribute to Jean-Claude Deshons, a dear friend who had passed away four years previously, and prints of the works exhibited (oil paintings on embroidered tapestries, silver prints on transparencies reworked using wax paint, and photograms of images from the film Trotteuses).
2013 — 146 pages — 227 × 163 mm
Cadastre8zéro Éditeur
This is a new bilingual (French/Arabic) edition of Bernard Noël’s poem, Ce jardin d’encre, including two previously unpublished cantos. For this publication, Mohammed Bennis’s Arabic translation was preferred, and Francois Rouan’s illustrations accompany the text.
2011 — 308 pages — 227 × 160 mm
Cadastre8zéro Éditeur
Ce jardin d’encre has its source in the friendship between the poet and the painter. This edition is bilingual (French/Spanish). Rouan ‘buries’ Bernard Noël’s text within a photographic work, choosing to present the text within a framework which echoes the rigorous structure of the poem. The poem comprises five cantos and seven stanzas: each stanza is itself composed of seventeen verses of seventeen feet.
The poem was translated by Sara Cohen.
2008 — Set of 2 volumes — 215 × 182 mm
Éditions Galilée
152 pages
Rouan le peintre was written by Dominique Cordellier following the exhibition Primatice, Maître de Fontainebleau, held at the Louvre Museum in 2004. The exhibition showcased works by François Rouan (encaustic paintings, panels of photographic works, and a film entitled Di sotto in su): these were presented in counterpoint to works by the Italian master. The volume presents a biography of the artist, following the model of Vasari’s (1550, 1568) Lives of the Artists, followed by an inventory of the (living) artist’s workshop. The story is illustrated by photographic overprinting.
120 pages
This volume brings together most of the studies (encaustic paintings, photographs and photograms of the films Di sotto in su and Le Petit Objet) which accompanied the original installation entitled Le Tombeau de Francesco Primaticcio (2004-2006). The postface was written by Dominique Cordellier. The works include twelve encaustic paintings, nine silver print photographs (reworked with wax), and three photographic friezes: they belong to a collection held at the musée ‘les Abattoirs’ in Toulouse.
