Kean is a French painter who started his creative talent in the urban space as a graffiti artist. Currently he focuses on painting on canvas. He was born in 1988 and lives and works in Mulhouse.
How did you get into art?
First I deployed my creative talents in the urban space, as a graffiti artist. Then gradually, I left the walls of the city to devote myself to painting on canvas. Originally, I have a fascination for the color gradients animating the backgrounds of my graffiti, on which I will focus, gradually abandoning lettering. I developed a very personal way, which led me from graffiti to abstraction. My science of gradations and shades of colors is endowed with a strong emotional power, inciting the viewer to daydream and contemplation.
How would you describe your style? What makes your work special?
My works are part of the heritage of the American Color Field, but also and above all of the Californian movement of Light and Space, whose artists, like the famous James Turrell, have placed at the center of their concerns the study of the phenomena of perception, in particular light and space.
My paintings show a great mastery of gradations, which I expresses in a very nuanced way, in subtle games of color mixtures. These are superimposed in fine pictorial layers, in order to blend into each other. This long and patient elaboration gives all their density to the landscape abstractions, which evoke here the deep blue of a night sky, there the orange yellows of the burning summer sun, elsewhere the pink lights appearing at daybreak. My paintings are an invitation to escape, the canvas being seen as a window symbolically opening onto another world. This passage from the real world to the imaginary and dreamlike world has been materialized by the contours that encircle my gradations, and which take up in a very abstract way the oval shape of a porthole, the quadrangular shape of a window or the vertical of a a door.
How do you go about developing your work?
Photography led me to develop formal constants for my painting, such as the division of the surface by a horizon line in the lower third of the composition as well as the delimitation of my canvases by white margins, like a draw.
Who or what influences you?
I felt the need to capture, through photography, strong sensations triggered by the sight of a landscape, the contemplation of distant horizons, the observation of minute variations in light and color in the sky over thread of day and night. Of course, masters of art inspire me like Felipe Pantone, Thomas Trum, Bernard Frize, Paul Kremer, Callum Innes, Lee Ufan, Mark Rothko or Pierre Soulages.
Make us curious. What is planned next?
Create paintings with new vibes, travel and work for exhibitions for international galleries…
