Can you tell us a little about yourself and your artistic practice?
My name is Jules Dedet Granel, better known by my artist pseudonym: L'Atlas.
I'm a painter and I also work with silver-based photography.
What's your background, and how did you get started?
I first became interested in calligraphy, typography, graffiti and Sign (in the Barthian sense of the word*) when I was a teenager in Paris in the 90s. I then traveled during the 2000s to meet, film and receive practical knowledge from calligraphers in countries such as Morocco, Egypt, Syria, China and Japan. I gradually digested these different calligraphic influences and combined them with other art-historical currents such as Optical Art, Geometric Abstraction, Minimal Art and Lyrical Abstraction.
My desire is to merge the art of writing with the history of painting; to paint writing and write painting is the axis of reflection of my practice, through a geometric and totemic plastic work that aims to be universal, "Atlasique". It's a pictorial work situated at the intersection between gesture and intention, between the creative process and the work's final idea. The idea here is to read each shape as a letter, and each letter as a shape. To read painting and contemplate writing. I've been painting and writing daily in my studio for the past 20 years, to express a vision that is at once concrete, abstract and universal, one that seeks to break down the boundaries between different currents in the history of art and merge them through my practice.
I also create monumental murals, and am carrying out a photography project with my first 7 canvases, which I'm staging on the cities of the world map.
What inspires you in your day-to-day work as an artist? What triggers the creation of a work?
It could be visiting an exhibition or seeing a manhole cover or scaffolding, for example. I'm inspired both by contemplation of the urban architectural world, and by the digested vision of this world by other artists, which I assimilate through knowledge of their work.
Can you explain how you create a work of art? What are the different stages of the creative process?
I devote myself to finding every possible form of the word “L’Atlas,” pushing the boundaries of the legibility of both the letter and the word. In this way, I enhance its abstraction while also emphasizing the universality of the resulting visual work. To do 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 simple 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 creating a dialogue between “Cold” (Geometric) Abstraction and “Warm” (Gestural) Abstraction.
Sometimes I encrypt my logograms with checkerboard patterns or grids of lines to heighten the painting’s energy and further abstract the word from its legibility. I also create series of prints using large stamps, which I combine with gestural techniques such as “dripping” or lyrical abstraction.
*Read Roland Barthes’s *The Empire of Signs*.
Follow L'Atlas on Instagram .