François Winants
Biography
François Winants is a Belgian artist based between Spa and Brussels. A graduate of La Cambre in drawing, he is researching space and experience. His main topics are: climate and relief, air movements, atmospheric phenomena and geological formation processes.
His work focuses on intuitive and documented research. They give birth to works and projects where the subject is involved in the device. His practice is in a relationship between the body and the forces. It is constantly changing from encounters and uncertainties.
At the centre of his process is a permanent reflection between design and art, art and science, the act of the artist and the machine, craft and industry, analogue and digital.
Artistic approach
It was after developing complex machines using microcontrollers and Processing that François went back to totally analogue devices interacting directly with the subject without any complex resources. The instruments are designed so that they are as basic and light as possible, robust and repairable, needing no energy of battery.
Dessins des cimes are achieved by a machine made out of a board and a pen suspended one meter above the ground, rigged to several treetops. The instrument is directly linked to the spontaneous movements of the forest, capturing its breaths and time passing by, becoming co-author of the drawing.
This drawing project is directly fuelled by its environment, nourished by a science that perceives nature as a technician. It offers a new perception of nature, revealing things we may not have seen. With these images, we become spectators of a world that is moving without us in the center of an uninhabited forest.
