Moonwalk

"Performative actions are essential to François Morelli’s interdisciplinary practice. His earliest walks were conceptual transcriptions of material process. With canvases wrapped around his feet, the friction of his body meeting the ground became the art. These worn canvases in Earth Walk, 1974, referenced the history of non‑objective painting. Over the next three decades, his walks challenged the durational and relational limits of the social and physical body as he encountered borders, conventions and intersubjectivity. His travels and performances with sculptural artifacts were peripatetic events touching on identity, migration, territory, nationalism and sexuality. Migration, 1984, Transatlantic Walk, 1985, and Trans Cultural Cycle, 1986 – 1987, were private forms of resistance taking place on three continents in an attempt to realign history with artistic content and intention. Moon Walks, 2010 – 2011, marks a more discreet iconoclast’s leap into the last frontier, that “outer space” between Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” of 1969, and Michael Jackson’s Moonwalks. Walking in their footsteps with one foot wrapped in a Moon Flag, Morelli examines the poetic possibilities of this displacement."

Fraser, Marie. et al. The Québec Triennial 2011: The Work Ahead of Us. Montréal: Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 2011.