Nouvelle direction, 2025

17 Kael  

Kael

Painter-sculptor, has made a living from his art for thirteen years.

In 2001, he launched the Gueules de bois, exhibitions of his first works, a dreamlike assemblage of driftwood, feathers, seashells, motley sculptures and primitive art.

In 2004 he opened a studio-gallery, a space he took over by gradually increasing the number of oil on canvas.

Fearing to be compartmentalized in one technique or the other, refusing to rub shoulders with academic training, he plays with materials and supports, from stone to metal, from porcelain to wood, naive works imbued with spirituality that memory of his past travels and their colorful notebooks.

Dozens of paintings in gestation, the artist is already very prolific, with three to four hundred pieces per year and a production which is becoming unbridled.

Exhibited at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris or at the modern garage in Bordeaux, the strength of his raw paintings, sculptures or series of diverted objects was recognized in 2008. The General Council of Charentes Maritime awarded him the first prize in the seagulls competition “ retour de pêche “, pioneering work from which emerges his dripping and dripping technique.

The painter searches, begins to circle the black, his colors. Dialogue of faces carved with a billhook, tender or resigned looks that seek each other. Meeting of man and animal, mixture of half-human, half-plant totems, hordes of disarticulated forms assail the wall or the painting, tangled bodies that come out of the frame, emerge from the wood, emerge from the material itself for to come together and unite.

Crossing the background of happy years and dark periods, the airy and light canvases alternate with visceral creations nourished by a “trashy experience”, wounds and bumps of childhood, suffering, conflicts, love, fatherhood, couple, I paint my life ".

Kael, a signature punctuated by a childish and dreamy sun, "the lucky star to all my paintings".

Animist attentive to the symbols and hidden signs of life, he wipes his brush on the cracked apron, the skin of a marine animal with the scales of paint hardened by time.