Kean French, 1988-

Kean is a French graffiti artist and painter. Born in 1988. Lives and works in Mulhouse, east of France.

As a means of freeing oneself from time and ordinary space but also seen as an exercise of appeasement and balance, Kean's work is a call to escape, to travel, to look towards the world.

In that sense, the frame, the window are two important "components" in its approach. Whether rectangular in shape or representing a porthole, his canvases take up some codes of photography not only as a medium but also as an aesthetic (in particular the separation of the frame, portrait format, in 1/3 - 2/3). Another technical aspect put forward by the artist and which characterizes his compositions concerns his formats ; they are all designed with the proportion of the golden ratio. His constructed experiments form the basis of a (poetic) search for balance which gives the artist the possibility of developing and deepening a pictorial language focused on color gradient, on iridescence. Like windows opening onto horizons that are both close and different, his paintings are as much the transcription of sensations as the reactivation of natural lights, whether they have been captured in photos or kept in memory during travels. Impregnated by this idea of leaving a trace, initially on the walls, in an ephemeral way, it is indeed in a second time that this desire arose on the canvas; and this, precisely in order to become more sustainable over time. The transition of support, its gradual passage from wall to canvas, was indeed accompanied by several other transitions: that from lettering to abstraction, from spray paint to acrylic paint.

This focus has been pushed by the fact that the range of acrylic colors offers the artist greater possibilities than the aerosol range allows. His practice of iridescence, which finds its origins in the work of backgrounds he made on the walls upstream of his lettering, operates a link between urban art and contemporary painting.