2026
Ad Vitam Aeternam
Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Unapologetic, bold, and theatrical, Fabienne Francotte’s ad vitam aeternam unravels like a passionate affair, taking the viewer into the tangled tempest of emotions which is love. Tender and violent, the exhibition explores the unpredictable harmony of this emotion. Inspired by the obsession with the experience and love’s expression across time, particularly in South Asia, the artist’s exploration of the subject delves into the
layered potency of love's passion and trauma.
Anchoring itself on the unsaid, Francotte traces the physical contours of love with the intensity of a collision, laying bare a lifetime of experiences. Imagined as a deck of tarot cards, the reading shifts with the viewer's experience of the subject - its open-ended ambiguity permitting the exhibition to contain infinite readings of an experience as universal and intoxicating as love.
The series Limited Edition presents itself like a devastatingly beautiful siren song, meandering through fragmented dream-like states of passion, unrequited desire, and innocent longing. The tension between the paired images essays two sides of one narrative, neither incomplete nor whole, but true from the perspective it is told.
Francotte employs fabric for the innate comfort carried in its folds, and its ability to conceal scars, while revealing a silent inner world as a metaphorical anchor on which she builds the thesis of the exhibition. Lips, parched for touch, are arrested in animation as they part with longing and expectation. The colour red, applied with urgency, evokes the rush of blood through the skin as emotions swell, becoming an invitation to register
sublime, visceral sensations.
Ad vitam aeternam is the everlasting imprint of love tattooed onto the skin. Angst and beauty, love and fear, wrap around each other in the series, The Tattoo of Love. As the thread moving in and out of fabric mimics the repeated movement of a needle, fabric becomes skin. The suggestive and sensual patterns become both yearning etched into the body and pain that inhabits its recesses.Woven into the fabric of existence and threaded through skin, love is carried in the body long after the feeling has passed. ad vitam aeternam is Francotte's reckoning with that permanence.
