Francis Kyle Gallery

François Houtin


L'Ancetre etching ed.80 19 x 25in 50 x 65cm £690 (inc. VAT)	Fantasie Romantique No7 encre de chine, 2007/8 12 x 12in 30 x 30cm

Le Grand Garoubier encre de chine, 2009 22 x 76in 22 x 30cm	Destins encre de chine, 2009 19 x 15in 48 x 39cm
Price range: £195 - £5750 (ex VAT)

Francois Houtin

FRANÇOIS HOUTIN, creator of 'Utopian' gardens in pen-and-wash and etching, was born in Craon in Haut-Anjou, France in 1950. Trained initially as a landscape architect, he participated in the restoration of the Tuileries Gardens. By the late 1970s, however, it had become clear to him that that greater satisfaction lay in the creation of imaginary gardens located well beyond the range of practical realisation, and he changed course dramatically, retraining in the discipline of etching, the medium for which he would win major prizes in the course of the 1980s. Houtin's vision of gardens is indebted to certain historical prototypes from the Emperor Hadrian's Tivoli to the Boboli Gardens in Florence or Orsini's mannerist fantasy at Bomarzo. No less important for him are precedents in myth and imaginative literature and painting from the mysterious walled gardens ('Paradises') of the ancient Near East to the grottoes of neo-gothic fantasy.

In keeping with the best Italian traditions, Houtin's gardens are well furnished with fragmentary architecture conveying a mood of elegiac decay, while the vestiges of grand designs, manifest in a profusion of topiary-lined avenues, evoke French precedents. Elsewhere, temples and pavilions scattered over undulating slopes speak of an enthusiasm for English garden practice. Bordering at times on the surreal, baroque in their richness and extravagance of conception, Houtin's gardens are hybrid creations in terms of both their botany and architecture, which wittily plunder a wide spectrum of conventions. Most importantly, perhaps, they refer not only to the past, explored in playful parody, but just as forcefully to the future - a vision of interlocking gardens like apartments in a palace, each one a metaphor for new or neglected values and priorities in a changing environment.

Since 1978 Houtin has held some thirty one-man exhibitions of watercolours and etchings in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Sicily, Switzerland and the United States of America, including public shows in Rome (1984), Palermo (1985), Paris (1992) and Nice (2000). He has represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1994 with exhibitions in 1996 and 2000. Since 1976 eight sequences of Houtin's etchings have been published, including Désirs, Délices, Délires (1978), Topiaire (1980), Cinq Jardins, Cinq Sens, with text and poems by Federico Garcia Lorca (1982), Fantaisies Romaines (1985) and Cabanes de Jardinier (1999).