Canadian-born, Venice-based painter François Xavier Saint Pierre's exhibition One Tenth was specially conceived for the Biblioteca Morandiana, a library dedicated to Italian modernist painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) within Palazzo Franchetti. The exhibition's title originates from a letter written by Morandi in 1930, in which he states that he would be satisfied to achieve one tenth of what Jean-Siméon Chardin had accomplished.
Chardin (1699-1779) had a profound influence on Morandi, who kept no fewer than five monographs on the French artist in his library. Though separated by centuries and geography, this artists shared striking affinities: contemporary critics noted their fondness for depicting objects through a soft haze, or, in Morandi's case, allowing forms to dissolve altogether.
One Tenth initiates a transhistorical conversation centred on artistic fellowship, legacy, authenticity, seriality and the transmission of pictorial knowledge. By investigating the material production of historical imagery and themes of repetition and indeterminacy, Saint Pierre's work highlights the haptic, non-verbal knowledge generated through the act of painting itself. Ultimately, the exhibition is a tribute to modernist painting's ambition: to paint the process of perception rather than the thing perceived.
Saint Pierre presents here is own historically faithful reconstruction of Chardin's The Jar of Apricots (1758), a painting in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario in his native Toronto. This still life, which the artist produced as part of research into 18th-century painting techniques, is accompanied by a series of four related paintings, each with their own cromatic logic.
A second body of work takes as its starting point a pennant or standard as viewed through a window. Inspired by the military standards used by Roman cavalry and recalling the work of Tiepolo and Mantegna, the Signum series addresses how visual props can serve as markers of collective identity.
Completing the exhibition is the series entitled Pittrici, small panels based on a historical motif from the frontispiece of a French treatise on painting published in 1699 showing a woman before an easel. They are a not to the context of the exhibition - within a library - and raise greater questions about continuity, variation, and the types of knowledge generated by a text vs. the types of knowledge generated by making an object or image. The archetypal painter motif evokes the solitary inner world of the image maker and recalls Agnes Martin's artistic imperative to "paint with your back to the world."
Within the library itself, Saint Pierre also presents a new editioned silkscreen print, displayed alongside original etchings by Giorgio Morandi.
About the artist:
François Xavier Saint Pierre is a French-Canadian artist based in Venice, Italy, where he has lived since 2020. He received a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Concordia University in Montreal and an MFA from the University of Waterloo. His work has been exhibited since 2003 in Canada, UK, and Italy, and he has been an artist in residence in London, in Sweden, and at he French Academy in Rome, Villa Medici. A survey exhibition of his work, The Spiders and the Bees, was presented at Koffler Gallery in Toronto in 2021-22. A version of that exhibition travelled to Venice during the Venice Biennale (2022), and to Palazzo Borghese in Rome (2023). In 2025, he was invited to exhibit in the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.