Herald St

Francis Offman

Museum St, 43 Museum St, WC1A 1LY

4th June - 23rd July 2021

I worked with Francis Offman for the first time three years ago, during an exhibition included in ‘Open Tour’ (a project for art students involving the leading institutions
and galleries of Bologna), when Offman was taking the course in painting taught at the Art Academy by Luca Bertolo. In the planning of the exhibition, I had asked Luca to suggest some students, and (rather reluctantly) he wrote just three or four names on a piece of paper, with Francis at the top of the list. I didn’t know him, and I knew nothing about him. Luca had mentioned that Francis was from Rwanda, and spoke of the “sincerity” of the work he was developing in the course, but he said these things with the terseness of someone who believes that biographical notes and works should be kept at a proper mutual distance.

I often wonder what should be revealed of the history of an artist like Offman,
and the answer is almost nothing, or everything but without too much emphasis, hopefully with just a few pithy phrases. The only thing I feel I should add is another phrase, which Francis likes to repeat: “I waste nothing.” He is referring to the attitude of gathering and safeguarding: canvases and papers he may have found in the classrooms at the academy, perhaps already utilised and set aside by other students, old sheets, the tissue paper of shoeboxes, wrappers used for bread and coffee grounds collected from the pot over a time span that can last for months.

These things and his way of using them can contain direct though very fleeting references to his country of origin. Yet instead of revealing a political undercurrent in his work - which exists, of course, even if I believe it is misleading to unravel it too thoroughly, as I already mentioned - they offer many indications on certain aspects of his practice, which seems to be organised around a single rule: buy nothing, and take care of waste.

The actions that go into Offman’s practice rely on encounters with evocative materials, in forms and times that may seem erratic and very long at times. The choice of papers and other materials like jute and linen, for example, is a reaction to random and extemporaneous stimuli, while the preparation of the mixture of coffee develops across a very wide time span, regulated by daily salvaging from the coffeemaker. Only in the summer does he spread the substance in the open air to dry, then sifting it to make a blend with glue, plaster and pigment.

I realise that thus far I have described Offman’s work in a way that differs from my intentions, perhaps, lingering over only certain aspects – the biographical side and the dimension of the process that comes prior to the construction of the image – which seem to be simply a preamble to the story of his paintings.

The things I have mentioned – the mixture of coffee, plaster, different types of paper reduced to scraps and torn bits – constitute a sort of initial palette, a sampling of “colours/materials” and signs that suggest basic elements of painting (marks,

brushstrokes, gestures that assert or erase) arranged and combined on a surface (canvas or paper) in a context of variability and improvisation. In Offman’s works the same things combined and recombined in different ways constitute images in the form of dialogues or contrasts (sometimes true battles) between different fields and tones – misty, powdery and earthy, or warm, bright, shrill – capable of dilating and expanding, of reciprocal thrust or compression.