Christopher French’s work lies in the intersection between reading and seeing; it permits him to communicate his concerns in a way that is not only visual, but also tactile.  His work consists of precise geometrical patterns, combining tonal and chromatic variations.  After discovering a discarded book printed in Braille on the streets of New York City in 1986, French took a strong look at the literal and metaphorical use of Braille paper in his work. By maintaining a sort of inscrutable silence throughout his work, French’s Braille pages seem to utilize blindness as a metaphor for insight.  His indecipherable images resist simplification or translation because they do not narrate complete stories, as much as they elicit open ended experiences.

“The paintings, painted photographs, and video works I have made in the past decade incorporate texts written in Braille as a metaphor for the perceptual tension between looking and touching, comprehension and intuition.  My newest paintings use the variability of gridded color patterns or panoramic spreads of color to intimate iconic meanings or imply multivalent images.  Painted on Braille pages gridded for graphing and mathematical calculation, some paintings are constructed intuitively; their identical, symmetrical colored panels can be rearranged to create different Rorschach-like combinations.  The color spreads in other paintings generate latent images, reinforcing the idea of painting as the nexus between abstraction and representation, object literalness and allusive metaphor.” 

Christopher French was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1957.  He attended the University of California at Davis, receiving his Bachelors degree in Art in 1980.  French spent the next twenty years in the Washington D.C. area, where he was director of the Washington Project for the Arts and active member of the reviving Washington Color School. 

French is known foremost as a painter, but also as a curator, arts administrator, art critic, and teacher of art.  In 2000 French moved to Houston from Washington D.C. His work has been widely exhibited in Texas, on both coasts, and abroad, yet this is his first solo exhibition in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.  French is also represented by the Marsha Mateyka Gallery in Washington D.C., as well as the Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery in Houston. He has received a Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris County Fellowship (2003), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship (1999), a Cité Internationale des Arts Residency Grant (1996), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1993). In 2003 Clint Willour of the Galveston Art Center organized a twelve year survey of the artist’s work. The exhibition traveled to Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX and Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, TX.

His work can be found in the Washington D.C. collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Goethe-Institut, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, McNeese State University, and the National Museum of American Art, as well as the corporate collections of Hewlett- Packard, Progressive, and Sallie Mae, Inc.  Recent articles on his work include reviews in The Washington Post, Art Papers, Artlies, ARTnews, Houston Press, Glasstire, Los Angeles Times, Tema Celeste, and numerous others.