Francks Francois Deceus - Haiti Born in Haiti in 1966, Décéus and his family moved to Brooklyn, New York when he was nine years old. It wasn’t until he graduated from Long Island University with a degree in Sociology that he turned to making art as a career. Stylistically his work incorporates many of the influences and aesthetic forms of the 40’s and 50’s visual artists like William Johnson and Jacob Lawrence, and 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. Décéus was profiled in a 1998 issue of the International Review of African American Art as “one of the leading young modern painters of his generation, whose work depicts a high degree of sensitivity to social issues and his culture”. He is featured in the book “100 New York Painters”, an extensive survey of significant New York painters and their widely diverse works. His work has been commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. and is in the permanent collection of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Xavier University, and a host of private collections. |