Born in 1969 in Belfort, François-Édouard Finet grew up in a family where music, literature, and painting shaped everyday life. A graduate of the École Supérieure d’Arts Graphiques – Atelier Met de Penninghen, from which he graduated top of his class in 1994, he decided the following year to devote himself entirely to painting, drawing, and photography.

Since 1995, he has exhibited one to three times a year, in Paris, across France, and abroad. His work, at the crossroads of figuration and abstraction, explores the relationship between body and spirit, matter and light, gravity and impulse.

In his canvases as in his watercolors, nature — mountains, creeks, skies, architecture — becomes a pretext for an inner dialogue. Water, stone, and air blend in a constant tension between the visible and the invisible. For him, painting is not about representing but revealing: “Each reality appears only by showing its opposites,” he says.

His technique combines the strength of the knife stroke with the fluidity of watercolor. Pigments, matter, and light converse until the canvas comes alive. In his drawings — nudes, portraits, landscapes — the line adapts to each subject, not to trace its contours but to bring forth its soul, its vibration, its state of being.

Between figuration and abstraction, his work evokes the passage from the carnal to the spiritual, from the solid to the aerial — a quest for balance between what weighs us down and what elevates us.

What brings us together :

At Davidson, we are deeply moved by this search for balance — this fertile tension between matter and spirit, control and release.

Like François-Édouard Finet, we see creation as a living act, shaped by listening, movement, and intuition. His painting speaks of transformation, interaction, and transcendence — values that drive us every day.

His way of uniting figuration and abstraction resonates with our collective vision: to make opposites converse in order to create meaning. His luminous, vibrant landscapes, inhabited by the elements, echo our own quest — to give form to the invisible, to reveal the energy of life itself.

In his work, as in ours, every gesture counts — precise, committed, animated by the desire to connect matter to what truly matters: the human being.