Athabasca - HPM IV - Purple & Yellow, 2022

Sowat  

Franco-American artist, having grown up between the south of France and Los Angeles, Sowat lives and works in Paris. His artistic journey began along the railroads in Marseille at the end of the 90s, with the practice of graffiti. During his adolescence, he spent his summers in California and there discovered chollo writing (calligraphy used by Mexican gangs) through the work of Chaz Bojorquez, a reference in the field. From then on, Sowat strives to appropriate this style to the point of developing his own language.

From Marseille to Paris, Sowat has for more than twenty years multiplied in situ interventions - legal or not - surrounded by the members of his crew, the Da Mental Vaporz, with whom he travels through France, Europe and then the globe to realize frescoes and monumental exhibitions. Recently, it is with Lek, a major figure in Parisian graffiti, that he has developed a four-handed work combining archeology, paintings, ephemeral installations and experimental films.

Indeed, it is with the latter that Sowat made himself known to the general public, amateur of graffiti, following their many projects born of a common passion: urban exploration. Thus, in 2011, they set up the "Mausoleum" project. Bringing together around thirty artists from French graffiti, the project remained secret during its realization (that is to say for more than a year) to finally be revealed in broad daylight through the publication of an eponymous book, the creation an ephemeral exhibition and the online broadcast of a stop motion video illustrated with music by Philip Glass. The public was then able to discover the many facets of a so-called "Urbex" graffiti which clandestinely invaded the thousands of square meters of an abandoned supermarket in the Parisian suburbs.

The following year, responding to the invitation of Jean de Loisy, Lek & Sowat entered the Palais de Tokyo to reproduce this creative process by seizing the "entrails" of the building, namely the emergency exits, the service stairs and other intermediate spaces traditionally inaccessible to the public.

With the help of Dem189 and curator Hugo Vitrani, they initiate the Lasco Project, the art centre's first official urban art program by inviting more than fifty key artists from this burgeoning scene to come and work with them. in the most unusual places of the institution.

It is within the framework of these interventions that Sowat & Lek carry out the project 'Traces Directs' with Jacques Villeglé as well as some twenty major French graffiti artists. Collaborative, this work has as object a blackboard of the institution on which the artists intervened in chalk one after the other, each erasing his creations as well as those of the one who preceded him, in front of Sowat's camera and Lek. Adorned today with the sociopolitical writings of Jacques Villeglé, this painting and the video of the performance that accompanies it are now part of the permanent collection of the Center Pompidou in Paris, a first for a work of Graffiti.

On canvas or paper, it is always his calligraphic research, executed with bamboo or spray paint, which unfolds. Sometimes readable, sometimes abstract, painted with energy or meticulously applied, the lines that Sowat draws on canvas are all junctions between pure tag - writing - and traditional calligraphy, between the raw universe of abandoned buildings and classical painting, between the energy of graffiti, often necessary for the intervention in situ, and the calm, the patience required for workshop work.

From September 2015 to August 2016, Sowat was, along with Lek, a resident of the Villa Medici in Rome.