His training began at the Ecole des Métiers d’art at Maredsous Abbey near Namur in Belgium, a goldsmith’s and woodcarver’s school founded in 1903 with the initial mission of “training workers and craftsmen skilled in all the techniques of the trade and capable of executing projects designed by artists“*. By the time Bernard François joined the school, however, it had long since increased the artistic dimension of its teaching, and many of its teachers were in fact creative artists – painters and sculptors in particular.

Later, at La Cambre in Brussels, Bernard François met up again with his former modelling teacher from Maredsous, the sculptor Félix Roulin, this time joining his Metal Studio. In both schools, the student learns from both experienced craftsmen and artists. Far from being a detail, this reality would determine his relationship with jewellery, because this unorthodox approach, free from the academic constraints of the goldsmith’s trade and above all the jeweller’s trade, was quite simply unthinkable at the same time in France. And it was partly this freedom, found in Belgium, that enabled him to develop such a unique formal language.

But beyond materials, Bernard François is also about a repertoire of forms – geometric, refined, futuristic – that characterise the period of creative effervescence between the 1960s and the end of the 1980s. The artist is fascinated by the visual and musical universe of pop culture, but also by the world of science and technology. An eternal optimist, he is curious and enthusiastic about every technological advance as a promise of progress. His jewellery draws on the material world of the time, evoking the aesthetics of electronic and arcade games, printed circuits, pixels, networks and CDs, to create works that are halfway between a games console and a precision instrument.

Bernard François’s works are like little time capsules, capturing the spirit of the times. Up until the turn of the millennium, their acid colours, synthetic materials and geometric shapes perfectly recreate the visual world of our cathode-rayed childhoods, lulled to the rhythm of pop hits broadcast by MTV. They also evoke the sophisticated structures of spaceships borrowed from science fiction movies, such as the Discovery 1 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the neon-coloured animated suits from Tron. From the 2000s onwards, however, his works reached a level of technical and compositional refinement previously unattained. 

Meanwhile, the artist has undertaken extensive travel, particularly in the United States, and produced a substantial body of photographic work. The result is a series of objects that represent a synthesis of all his past experiments.