L'ATLAS
France
6 Works exhibited on Kooness
Current location
Paris
Represented by
Works by L'ATLAS
The French artist Jules Dedet Granel, known as L'Atlas, born in 1978, finds the starting point for his plastic and pictorial work through his research into writing. He has studied calligraphy in several countries and cultures and thus creates his own original typographies. He is particularly attracted by the idea of creating a universal pictorial language, which is a right balance between the form and the letter, between the act and the intention. A game of infinite variations, outcropping and distancing itself from optical art and the various movements of abstract and geometric art. In the 1990's, he acted radically in the public space, making himself known in the field of graffiti; since the 2000's he has developed a studio work and exhibited his works in contemporary urban art galleries.
A major and internationally recognized figure of street art, he is renowned for his painted facades as well as for his monumental performances realized on the ground of cities in historical places, such as this huge wind rose commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2008, or on the Place du Capitole in 2012, in partnership with the city of Toulouse. These performances are the subject of videograms made frame by frame by the artist. He has also collaborated with major brands such as Perrier, whose mythical bottles he has adorned with his "Poptic'art" touch, a movement that mixes optical art and pop art, a name he claims to have invented. He has also worked with Agnès B, intervening on the clothes of the designer, who is one of the artist's most loyal collectors.
Atlas has the particularity of systematically seeking and renewing his approach and his expression of the letter and the line, of the codified rhythm of writing, seeking the border of the illegible, and methodically leading his work towards abstraction and minimalism; he considers every form as a letter and every letter as a form, which leads him to work recently with urban planners to give a third dimension to his art and to reinvest the public space in another way, thus giving a meaning to the architectural dimension of his work. He is now an artist whose rigorous work explains his success with collectors, the public and institutions.