Francis Baudevin

Francis Baudevin is aware of the historical trajectory and destiny of pictorial abstraction: Experimental and avant-garde forms of representation have not only been domesticated in the halls of museums and universities; absorbed by industrial design, they are employed on packaging, as visual signage, and in advertising—for the mass communication and marketing of big business. Abstraction—above all geometric abstraction—has a constant presence within the contemporary visual experience as a sort of “abstraction trouvé,” so ubiquitous in the panorama of consumer culture that it largely passes unnoticed. These are anonymous images, not works of art, which we recognize without associating them with anything specific.

Baudevin, however, is also aware that it is pointless to harbor nostalgia for modernism, to monitor its survival and decline—pointless to wonder who’s