Description
About POLAR : Olivier KENNEYBREW aka POLAR is a Franco-American artist, born in 1987 in Montpellier. Earlier, in the years 2000 to 2010, he still punctuated his life with graffiti outings and studies. Starting from a classic work of the letter, POLAR nevertheless gradually gave way to much more figurative things, of a very naive style, in 2012. He then spreads on the walls the concept of Bojos, these identifiable characters by their long strides, with a slightly sluggish pace under the effect of the Montpellier sun. Intoxicated with energy, motivated by the interactions with residents that his characters arouse, the young man cultivates the art of jokes and a taste for colors, always explosive. However, he aspires to familiarize himself with other means of giving free rein to his imagination, and gradually extends his forms towards more abstraction. By planting this new seed in his career, Polar begins a cycle which he sprinkles with solid references like Julio LeParc, of chance encounters but above all of trips, always further and above all, always longer.
Today the almost non-existent letters reveal poetic and sensitive compositions, when the illustrative disappears in favor of sleek geometric shapes. A supporter of subtlety, he recomposes the memories of his travels by giving a large place to Nature and the different vegetation that he has observed here and there. Far from being dead, his very nature diffuses waves of perfect roundness, visual layers of contemporary psychedelia. In a complete mastery of colors and gradients, these works whisper to us bits of life, sometimes very personal, almost spiritual.
Here he is, therefore, a young heir to landscape painting, this artistic genre recognized late and not without labor in the history of art, which he renews here by freeing himself from spatio-temporal landmarks, from any terrestrial gravity or well of standardized reality. Received internally as an aesthetic wonder, with these journeys Polar invents its own visual language, even reconsidering its position as a painter in urban space. Beyond its narrative power, Polar indeed perceives painting as a vector of cohesion and social exchange, like a meeting point between different cultures, different people, between locals and passengers. Admirer of these traveling writers, from Titouan Lamazou to Bruce Chatwin, he strives to make visible these great unspeakable things that everyone can come across during a trip: self-discovery in the unknown, and delicacy of the present moment. Enough to affirm an identity more than found, now serene and striking in freedom.