GrahPoll

Born in Divo in 1974 (Ivory Coast), GrahPoll is a Franco-Ivorian plastic artist who lives and has been working in France for twenty years, where he works as a professor in artistic education. He comes from the National School of Fine Arts of Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire) and the National School of Art of Limoges Aubusson (France). Grahpoll's work spans over twenty years with great diversity.

His time at the Ivorian School of Fine Arts led him initially to share all the enthusiasm of the former inventors of "Vohou-Vohou". The term Vohou Vohou, which means "assembly of anything", is presented as an art of recovery, assembly and gluing on frames of heterogeneous materials: string, tapas (beaten bark), cowries, rattan, sand, plaster, cardboard, glue, feathers, bones of fish. GrahPoll was initially known for his relief paintings. Influences traditional and academic mark his achievements, the originality of which lies for a good part in the choice of supports. The use of wood, rope, canvas, objects of recovery of all kinds, metal reinforcements coated with industrial fibers and vegetable. All these elements carefully selected and agglomerated in a coating thick give his first productions a very original character.

Today, he continues his reflection on contemporary painting through the use of the digital tool and explores the idea of a new pictoriality through tools and of non-pictorial materials. This artistic practice, anchored in its time, supports technological development while renewing the nature of languages
artistic and their mode of production. An approach that challenges the relationship that the artist talks with images and their means of production.

Legacies and social relationships leave a deep mark in the existence of everything individual and forever mark their sense of identity. Like his contemporaries, GrahPoll is open to the world, he knows he is at the crossroads of several cultures, he knows therefore identity and self-image are constantly being constructed and assaulted by various influences.

The series "The stars hatch in the cracks of the masks" questions the reports societal, the significance of identities, sometimes repressed and their persistence in the relationship to the other, to an interconnected global society. It is a fiction related to the question of identity, a creative bias in dialogue with the real and the marvelous. He offers avatars, contemporary, hybrid and mythological characters, a desire of incarnation in resonance with the philosophy of "Sankofa" and the triple connection between the past, present and future.

GrahPoll's plastic intention is to play with the reception of images by spectators, the codes and the relationship that these characters have with our own representations. Everything that has seduced us at GrahPoll for several years now invites us to follow him carefully in his new attempts.