De Glencoe - contemporary painter

François Carrière, alias De Glencoe, is a self-taught painter whose introduction to drawing belongs to the memory of a child amazed by his godfather, Joël Carrière, then a student at the Beaux-Arts in Lille. His artistic journey is rooted in a vital necessity: after forty years as a nurse, he discovered in 2022, following a bout of depression, that painting was no longer a choice but an act of survival. The studio then became a space for inner rediscovery. His first canvases explored coffee as a unique pictorial medium, working with the memory of suffering, the trace of emptiness and the form of confinement. The appearance of colour in 2024 marked a new intensity and the affirmation of a personal universe.

His inspirations draw on the world of David Bowie's Outside — provocative freedom, rejection of conventions — and that of Francis Bacon, fascinated by flesh, contained violence and the porosity between beauty and horror. Polymorphic in its early days, his work found a clear coherence in 2025 thanks to the skeletal writing of the framework of each canvas before its creation.

De Glencoe enjoys interacting with visitors, assessing the emotional impact of his pictorial work. Encouraged by these dialogues, his brush becomes a scalpel, cutting through appearances to dissect the raw material of our emotions. He favours acrylics, inks and materials, using an instinctive technique that seeks less to seduce than to provoke an intimate confrontation: ‘shaking without shocking’. To look at his canvases is to accept being shaken, to experience the juxtaposition of the raw form exposed and the beauty hidden at the very heart of the canvas.

An anecdote illustrates this reception: during his last exhibition, several visitors confided that they had ‘not emerged unscathed’ from their visit — proof that his paintings had achieved their goal: to get under the skin. Implicitly, his work reminds us of what painting can still do today: not decorate, but question, disturb and open up spaces where everyone is confronted with their flaws as well as their strengths.