Francis Palanc

Francis Palanc was born in Vence, France. At age sixteen, he finished schooling and joined his parents’ business as a trainee pâtissier. Alone at the back of the pastry shop, he began making visual art using the tools available: piping bags, spatulas, egg whites, sawdust, and caramel. He dyed eggshells with food coloring, crushed it into fine powder, and dusted it like sugar over wood-fiber boards, and used gum arabic for adhesive.

His surviving works reveal an intense preoccupation with the aesthetics, metaphysics, and linguist possibilities of geometry. Around age nineteen, Palanc developed a personal alphabet, used in his attempt to explore the mystical connection between his inner mind and life’s essence. His objectives revealed a man of great personal ambition and esotericism: “You do not trace anything,” he said, “only what you live traces yourself to the extent that what you live is unknown to everyone, even to you.”

After having caught the eye of Jean Dubuffet and exhibiting work in 1959, Palanc rebelled against the pressure and attention of the art world. In a rage he destroyed much of his art and ceased production. Subsequently, little is known about Palanc’s life. His childhood neighbor, gallerist Pierre Chave, remembered, “he had the warm personality of those who hail from southern France, but harbored great complexity: he spent a lifetime looking for a sign theory that would lend his life a sense.”