Can you remind us who you are and your artistic practice?
My name is Jules Dedet Granel, better known under my pseudonym of artist: L'Atlas.
I am a painter and I also practice film photography.
What is your background, how did you start creating?
I started to be interested in calligraphy, typography, graffiti, and the Sign (in the Barthian sense of the term*) when I was a teenager in the 90s in Paris. I then traveled during the 2000's to meet, film and receive practical knowledge from calligraphers in different countries such as Morocco, Egypt, Syria, China, and Japan. I have gradually digested these different calligraphic influences to associate them with other currents in the history of art such as Optical Art, Geometric Abstraction, Minimal Art or Lyrical Abstraction.
My desire is to merge the art of writing with the history of painting; painting writing and writing painting is the central theme of my practice, expressed through geometric and totemic visual work that aims to be universal, “Atlasic.” It is a pictorial work situated at the intersection between the gesture and its intention, between the creative process and the final concept of the work. The aim here is to read each form as a letter and each letter as a form—to read the painting and contemplate the writing. For 20 years, I have been painting and writing daily in my studio to express this vision, which is at once concrete, abstract, and universal, and which seeks to dissolve the boundaries between different movements in art history and to merge them through my practice.
I also realize monumental murals and carry out a photography project with my first 7 canvases that I put in scene on the cities of the world map.
In your daily work as an artist, what inspires you? What is the trigger for the creation of a work?
It can be a visit to an exhibition or the sight of a manhole cover or a scaffold for example. I am inspired both by the contemplation of the urban architectural world, and by the digested vision of this world by other artists that I assimilate through the knowledge of their works.
Can you explain to us the way in which you build a work? What are the different stages of creation?
I devote myself to exploring all possible forms of the word “Atlas,” pushing the boundaries of the legibility of both the letter and the word. In doing so, I reinforce its abstraction while simultaneously emphasizing the universality of the resulting visual work. To achieve this, I begin by working as a typographer—that is, I draw my letters on paper with a pencil. I then vectorize them in Illustrator and perform small mathematical calculations to position my “written form” at the center of the canvas. I can render these forms in a pure, minimalist style—primarily in black and white—or superimpose them onto abstract, gestural backgrounds, thereby exploring the contrast between “Cold Abstraction” (Geometric) and “Hot Abstraction” (Gestural).
Sometimes I obscure my logograms with checkerboard patterns of squares or stretches of lines to heighten the painting’s energy and further abstract the word from its legibility. I also create series of prints made from large stamps, which I approach using gestural techniques such as “dripping” or lyrical abstraction.
*Read *The Empire of Signs* by Roland Barthes.
Follow L'Atlas on Instagram.