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STREET ATELIER – L’ATLAS Studio Visit

02-LAtlas

“While the work I’m doing today is larger scale and in this case, higher concept, it’s still pure graffiti in many ways. The design we created for this New York installation is actually my name and tag. I’m always inspired by the original spirit of my art, which was rooted in hip-hop and graffiti.”

Since many years we follow French painter, photographer and video artist L’Atlas for some good reason. He studied calligraphy and typography and made a name for himself by combining calligraphy, graffiti, geometry and text. ATLAS is an artist that should be kept an eye on.We decided to feature him at our web series STREET ATELIER in cooperation with ARTE CREATIVE!

“For several years, I’ve been trying to fill the space of my paintings playing on the balance between full and empty. I was first inspired by the oriental calligraphic proportions, where white takes three quarters of the space and black one quarter. Then black and white were adjusted to take each half of the space in my paintings. The eye is then asked to read both the full and the empty. It is for this reason that my paintings were at that stage hybrid: they belong to both the history of calligraphy and the kinetic art. I subsequently screened the full and the void with square grids to blur the readability of the word and, in parallel, to increase the retinal vibration. With hindsight or through photography, the eye sees the ideogram appear and remain, according to the recurring formal structure of my name written this way.

I play on mental structural persistence so from one canvas to another that the eye sees the pattern by superimposing a similar mnemonic form . To this I added different shades of gray to break the flatness often inflicted by the exclusive use of black and white. Gray softens the kinetic effect by increasing the spatial volume of the paint. Finally I realized when making my cryptograms that the steps were often richer, more complex and universal in their abstraction, than the final idea I had initially. It is for this reason that I decided to isolate some of these steps and present them as final works.

In the same spirit, I took away the letters of my name, leaving only two square grids extracted form the ciphertext. I can not go further in the work of the full. I work now by subtraction, to recover the void. Studies on paper of my cryptograms in black marker on screen-printed grilles are also a step in this direction.

By removing my name, I give away the narcissistic spirit of graffiti in favor of a work based on minimum geometric abstraction.

This is how I brought my painting from meticulous calligraphy to abstraction.”

Artist Website: latlas.org

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lAtlas-Magda-Gallery-2
lAtlas-Magda-Gallery-1LAtlas-Be-What-You-Are-mural-in-Strasbourg-France-2012

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