Artist: Francks Deceus Title: As It Happens III Year: 2007 Dimensions: 13 1/2in. by 20in. Medium: Lithograph Condition: Excellent Signature Details: Signed, titled, dated and numbered 11/20 lower margin Other Details: unframed ARTIST BIO: Francks Francois Décéus continues to emerge as one of the important young painters of his generation. Born in Haiti, Décéus and his family moved to Brooklyn, New York when he was eleven years old. It wasnt until he graduated from Long Island University with a degree in Sociology that he turned to making art as a career. Essentially a self-taught artist, he studied printmaking at the venerated Bob Blackburn Printmaking workshop and in 2007 completed on a month-long printmaking residency in Gentilly, France. Over the course of his career, his work has moved chronologically from his childhood in Haiti, through his immersion into his new urban community as an immigrant, and recently, to his meditations on a conceptual vision of humanity. He has always been more interested in exploring themes and issues than in making definitive statements or creating a visual language with his art, and his work resonates with political and sociological content. Stylistically his work incorporates many of the influences and aesthetic forms of the 40s and 50s visual artists like William Johnson and Jacob Lawrence, and unconsciously reverberates with some of the artistic strains of his native Haiti. His modernist style combines figurative, abstract and layered elements and relies heavily on a simplification of form and function. If Basquiat, another of the artists influences, was noted for his visual loquaciousness, Décéuss work would be characterized by his semiotic economy, his minimalist use of imagery and his deliberately limited palette range within series of work. The artist was featured in “100 New York Painters”, an extensive survey of significant New York painters and their widely diverse works. In 2004, he was selected by curators at the Brooklyn Museum to participate in the exhibition “Open House: Working in Brooklyn”, an exhibition considered to be the largest survey ever devoted to contemporary Brooklyn -based artists. His work has been commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. His work is in the permanent collection of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Xavier University.