Liste Art Fair Basel 2025

François Durel (solo booth)

For LISTE 2025, Blue Velvet is pleased to propose a solo booth by Paris-based artist François Durel (b.1993)

Durel’s new series of sculptures are forged from industrial elements echoing the culture of production and labor. Through a focus on the formal language of the found objects that serve as bases for the sculptures, Durel's works reject clarity in favor of suggestion. The scenography framing the pieces then impose an architecture of constraint, where to labour means to flip inside out: revealing not function, but wound; not utility, but memory.

The series presents sculpture as a site of tension between incarnation and alienation. The human-like scale and carnal textures summon a sense of corporeality, while the industrial supports and rural detritus ground the objects in a staged temporality. Here, abstraction emerges not from reduction, but from the layering of contradictions—a domestic fragment made sacred through obsessive repetition and covering.

Durel’s sculptures do not offer resolution. Instead, they mark a space between fetishism and redemption, where memory is not healed, but held. Through formal restraint and tactile intensity, he invites us to navigate the divided, seductive terrain of personal and collective devotion.