September 5, 2026 | Art & Culture
MEMENTO FLORIS
With Memento Floris, François Farcy will explore memory beyond the image.
words Onur Baştürk
We have never documented our lives more obsessively, yet perhaps never been less present within them. In Memento Floris, François Farcy will explore how memory is carried through colour, material, music and scent. Flowers — rooted in memories of his grandmother’s house and garden — will form a thread between childhood, absence and the passage of time.
Presented at Galerie Anthologie in Paris from September 23–27, the exhibition will bring together painting, sculpture, an original soundtrack by Arthur Phanel and an olfactory work within a single sensory landscape.
TO TRULY FEEL THE PRESENT MOMENT
Do you think this constant need to document our lives is changing the way we remember them?
It changes things a lot. I think we often focus more on trying to record a moment than actually experiencing it. And emotions play an important role in the way our brain creates memories. You only have to look at people during the Bastille Day fireworks, for example: so many are watching them through a screen. In a way, we lose part of the reality of the experience, and our perception of the moment becomes altered. I think we need to be fully present to really experience a moment and all its beauty.
Of course, photographs and recordings can also be beautiful ways of recalling certain moments later on. But remembering something is very different from simply looking back at an image. With Memento Floris, I want people to reconnect with that idea: to truly feel the present moment and allow memory to reconstruct it through all our senses.
THE MEMORY OF FLOWERS
Flowers have been part of your work for some time, rooted in memories of your grandmother’s house and garden. What is it about them that still allows you to speak about memory, absence and transmission without becoming simply symbolic?
Flowers are symbolic for me, of course, because they naturally speak about the cycles of life: blooming, flourishing, fading, disappearing and returning. But at the same time, they are not only symbols. They are also very real elements of my memories.
The flowers I paint bring me back to specific times, places and seasons from my childhood in Neufmoulin, in the Somme region of France, through their colours, scents, textures and the way they change over time. Poppies in the fields immediately take me back to summer and to the fields in front of my grandmother Christiane Granger’s house. Flowers covered with frost or morning dew can evoke winter, or the chill of early autumn.
For me, flowers carry memory through many different senses. They are visual, but also olfactory and emotional. Sometimes a smell or a colour can bring something back much more vividly than a photograph. That is why I keep returning to them. They allow me to speak about the passing of time and the cycles of life, but they are also deeply connected to real experiences and memories. They are not simply symbols that I place into the work; they are already part of the memories themselves.
BEYOND THE CANVAS
For this exhibition, painting moves beyond the canvas into sculpture, sound and scent. At what point did you realise that painting alone was no longer enough to express what you wanted Memento Floris to become?
Whenever I visited a painting exhibition, I felt that something was missing: smell, and more generally the involvement of the other senses. I always thought it would be beautiful to experience an exhibition in a more complete way, with all of my senses activated.
I’m very sensitive to these things, so I can sometimes recreate those sensations in my mind quite easily. A smell, a light, an image or even a certain atmosphere can take me back in time. But I know this does not happen as naturally for everyone, and that is partly what made me want to explore the idea more deeply through Memento Floris.
What I really hope is that people leave the exhibition having rediscovered a memory they had forgotten. There is something almost magical about remembering something you thought was lost, as if it had been stored somewhere inside you, in a kind of inner library, and suddenly a word, an image, a perfume or a certain light gives you access to it again.
Personally, I have also been craving a stronger connection to my own past. I want to remember more, and I have become increasingly attentive to what my senses capture around me. At the same time, it felt urgent to develop this concept now, in a society that is becoming increasingly digital. We are constantly looking at the world through screens, and I find that slightly frightening.
The soundtrack, composed by Arthur Phanel under your artistic direction, was conceived to resonate with the paintings rather than illustrate them. How did that dialogue between image and music develop, and what could sound express that the paintings could not?
Music has become incredibly important in my life; today, I would even say it feels vital. Sound has this extraordinary ability to bring back a memory almost instantly. The simple sound of a church bell, for example, can take me back to the church near my grandmother’s village: to a happy Easter Sunday celebration, or even to her funeral. In that sense, music can take you through time just as powerfully as smell, colour or any other sensory experience.
What I wanted with Memento Floris was for people to enter a kind of bubble as they move through the exhibition. I don’t want the music to explain the paintings or tell people what they are supposed to feel. I want to show the works, let the music do its own magic, and allow people to connect with their own memories and interpretations.
The dialogue with Arthur developed very naturally. I shared the paintings, the memories and the ideas behind the exhibition with him, but I wanted him to have the freedom to respond to the project in his own artistic language.
What interested us was precisely what music could add without explaining anything. The paintings are fixed, while sound introduces time, movement and expectation. We wanted the music to carry the concept of Memento Floris into another medium, creating another emotional layer around the paintings — something perhaps more instinctive.
The paintings and the music do not explain one another; they coexist. Somewhere between the two, I hope each visitor can find something that belongs to their own memory.
MADELEINES FROM MY GRANDMOTHER’S KITCHEN
Scent can trigger memory instantly. Is there a particular smell that takes you straight back to a person, place or moment?
The smell that takes me back most instantly is that of madeleines fresh from the oven in my grandmother’s kitchen. That warm, golden smell of cake takes me straight back to my childhood.
For me, it is an incredibly happy smell, but also one that belongs to a time that has passed. It carries the presence of my grandparents and takes me back to a younger, more innocent version of myself, when life felt simple and I had no real responsibilities. At the time, I did not realise how happy I was. Looking back, I think it was one of the happiest periods of my life.
What fascinates me is that a smell can bring back much more than an image. It can suddenly restore an entire atmosphere, a person, a place and even the feeling of who you were at that moment. Before you have time to think about it, the memory is already there.
