Biography

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).

THE ART OF FRANÇOIS HOUTIN

Sir Roy Strong

Sinister, witty, fantastic, romantic, surreal, all of these words can be applied to the garden pictures of François Houtin. These are strange and haunting horticultural visions, their hallucinatory character heightened by the artist's use of monochrome. Houtin is above all a superb technician, never more so than in the subtle cadences of his etchings. Here is an eye and a mind from which allusions seem to tumble from Arcimboldo to Dali, from Desiderio Monzu to Le Doux, from Hieronymus Bosch to Schinkel. Here too are echoes of things seen in the great garden design and festival books of the past, extravagant pavilions, bizarre fountains and a world in which nature is subjected to almost savage contortions. Add to that the artist's cavalcade of the work of a topiarist seemingly in a permanent state of mental unbalance. This is the imaginary garden as theatre, as a setting for nightmare transformation scenes of a kind that throw up memories of the monsters, which lurk in the sacro bosco of Bomarzo.

Prophecy is often an attribute of artists, and in these fantasies Houtin prognosticates in extreme form a new garden reality. All the signals are in place for a return to meaning in the garden in defiance of the long reign of style devoid of intellectual content. The real gardens of a Derek Jarman and an Ian Hamilton Finlay are closer in spirit to the imaginary ones of Houtin than a cursory glance would admit. Houtin offers food for thought for today's garden-makers in a quite surprising way. The fact that no one is allowed to wander in his gardens, nor is a solitary gardener ever glimpsed, only adds to their hermetic hypnotic hold, intensifying what is a journey into mystery and madness.

Francois Houtin

François Houtin is a creator of imaginary gardens, arbours and labyrinths. Like the occupant of Franz Kafka's Burrow, he has left the walled or topiary-lined boundaries of his utopian spaces to cross over into the forests which surround them. Trees have imposed themselves on his vision as his new, overwhelming subject. 'It was in English parkland,' Houtin comments, 'that I fell so heavily under the spell of great trees. In realising a project to interpret imaginatively the future of a formal garden presently undergoing construction, I realised that for me the tree might become an essential symbol, the quintessence of the otherness of nature'.

In contrast to the garden, real or imagined, the tree has a tendency to extend beyond any boundary applied to it. Its roots are out of sight, its uppermost branches inevitably reach out beyond the picture frame, compelling the imagination to supply what cannot be seen. The tree is an image of the interconnectedness of things and our own ambivalent relationship with trees - our readiness as northern Europeans to feel at home in the sacred grove - reflects our desire for one-ness with the earth, our earliest image of the green man. As always, however, in Houtin's work, his vision may embrace a mythological dimension but it is firmly anchored in his experience and knowledge of practical botany acquired in his earlier years as a garden designer.

'Attracted to those trees with a strong character of their own,' observes the artist, 'I aim to express their individuality, it is as if the trees themselves are liberated by the scale in which I treat them. Trees of this great stature humble the gardener who can only hope to incorporate them into his schemes in an imaginary time-frame which will dwarf his own lifespan.'

The path he continues to pursue from horticultural reality into a poetic and imaginary world has led him in recent years away from an evocation of fantastic topiary realised with intense precision into a more southerly world where cypresses and palm trees flourish.

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