François Cante-Pacos
François Cante-Pacos has spent more than five decades moving between sculpture, furniture, and painting, since training at the École nationale supérieure des arts appliqués et des métiers d'art and, later, at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, in the studio of Étienne Martin. He won the Young Sculpture Prize in 1972, and in 1970 caught the attention of Pierre Cardin at the Europlastique exhibition, where he had devised a new technique between print and sculpture to produce the first thermoformed plastic poster.
From 1970 to 1978, Cardin invited him to design a series of utilitarian sculptures, editioned by Pierre Cardin Evolution and presented within Cardin's 1,000 square meter Espace on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, alongside designers such as Maria Pergay, Yonel Lebovici, and Giacomo Passera.
His work moves fluidly between drawing, sculpture, and furniture, applying the material language of lacquer, precious woods, ivory, and bronze — drawn from the tradition of the great Art Deco cabinetmakers — to smooth, rounded, undulating volumes recalling ship hulls, tortoise shells, or the bodywork of a car. Signature pieces such as the Carapace cabinet and the Chrysalide jewelry case carry this vocabulary into objects built from an interplay of solid mass and hollow, tension and repose.
From the mid-1970s, his practice expanded into public and private commissions across France, including monumental sculptures for the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Gare Montparnasse, and the headquarters of SPIE in Cergy-Pontoise. In 1988, the architect Jean Willerval commissioned a sculpture spanning the facade of a tower at La Défense, and in 1997 Cante-Pacos completed a white marble altar for the Église de la Roquette in Paris, commissioned by Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger — a form he later revisited in a series of console sculptures in ivory-lacquered wood and black-stained oak.
A former member of the French national sailing team, Cante-Pacos brings to his work a sensibility shaped by the sea — its scale, its discipline of form, its economy of means. In 2018, a number of his 1970s furniture designs, never previously produced, were editioned for the first time and presented on the occasion of a solo-show exhibition at the Galerie Gastou, where his works continue to be regularly featured.
