THIS FRENCH IS PINOY!

It is impossible to walk around Henri Eteve’s Pasay studio without bumping into one of his artistic experiments. Even his upstairs bathroom isn’t spared; resting on the wall by the toilet are canvases that couldn’t be accommodated by the many stacks colonizing the floor below.

Mr. Eteve, a Frenchman who has lived in the Philippines for 45 years, is celebrating his prolific career by holding a three-venue exhibition titled This French is Pinoy! Each individual show is thematically different: predominantly black, white, and red pieces hold fort at Alliance Francaise de Manille while a tightly curated retrospective can be found at the White Cube Gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Manila; canvases bursting with color, meanwhile, hang on the walls of Alliance Francaise de Cebu.

What remains constant is the artist’s distinctive "look." His textured canvases depict whimsical animals and tribal-like human beings seen from a flat perspective. Mr. Eteve, who uses the nom d’artiste Di Meliora (Latin for "a better life"), is guided by a concept he calls "cosmovistique" whether he is creating a painting, tapestry, sculpture, or digital image.

"‘Cosmovistique’ is life in the cosmos and it includes all of us," he said in his French accented English. "My art comes from two basic inspirations: the conscious and unconscious. The first is specific; the second is when you let your mind flow free."

Mr. Eteve was born in Paris in the 1940s. As a seven-year-old boy, he wandered the streets of Montmartre where the likes of Camille Pissarro, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse once painted. "I didn’t know anything about modern art," shrugged Mr. Eteve. "It’s interesting when you don’t know what to do."

Unsuited to the structure of formal art lessons, Mr. Eteve refused to get stuck in a mold. He decided to go his own way and invent his own techniques while playing with various materials. "Different things come out depending on what you’re working with, even if you use the same ‘style.’" Marble, for example, is stubborn: "You don’t control it, it fights back."

His curiosity is all-encompassing. Amid the geometric metal sculptures and dot paintings in his studio are eye-grabbing oddities such as piece consisting of a human vertebra fused to whale vertebra, and forks and spoons sticking out of colorful mosaics. "Anywhere you go, the mind is processing," Mr. Eteve explained, who counts abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky, sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian as kindred spirits (their art practices proved to Mr. Eteve that he wasn’t crazy).

An itinerant soul, Mr. Eteve joined the French Foreign Legion at the age of 18. According to his recollection, he backpacked through the deserts of the Middle East and lived, at various points in his life, in Spain, the UK, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia and Malaysia.

In the 1960s, he found his way to Manila where he eventually shacked up in Indios Bravos, a bohemian café inhabited by culturati. "I had to suffer the condition of not being a millionaire," Mr. Eteve said, adding that the artist who lived in the next room would turn out to be National Artist Benedicto "BenCab" Cabrera.

On view at the Met’s White Cube Gallery is a circular piece titled The World is Turning, which Mr. Eteve painted while he lived on the second floor of Indios Bravos. One night, while working on the said piece, a bullet from a gun fired on the first floor zinged in between Mr. Eteve and the canvas without harming either. It left a peephole in the Frenchman’s floor, which he never bothered to cover up. On days he was unsure of the crowd downstairs, he would look through the hole to see if there was anyone interesting.

"Indios Bravos was all about c’est la vie," he said, adding that his stay there taught him that art is about perseverance. "Not everyone is a grand genius," he said. "I started on my art alone. I made my own world inside and to this day, I can’t do any other thing."

He found a patron in businessman and artist Fred Elizalde, in whose compound he now lives and works. "Most people will not let you do what you want to do," Mr. Eteve said, adding he was lucky to find a benefactor in Mr. Elizalde.