So Aguessy Raboteur

My artistic approach

Through my portraits I singularly question the different roots and origins, the African, Caribbean and European identities within current society. A questioning that has become as personal as it is impersonal because it is a common and central subject of a globalizing, interconnected and digital culture. A (mixed)weaved society, like a spider's web, converging from the extremes towards a still undetermined central point.

The beginnings of this young 21st century already prove to us that tomorrow identity boundaries will be more and more permeable and cultures more and more mixed. How useful will the word race be at the end of this century? I propose a leap forward in time, to explore, meet, exchange, photograph, question by creating representative portraits of the individuals of today and tomorrow.

Portraits which in all their forms challenge me, because with the advent of digital identities and their representations (e.g. avatars) which are added to classic representations, a new problem of identity and social representation emerges from the virtual. A vast and distinct axis which must be explored. I see my future creations as potential points of convergence between our universe and these virtual worlds.

I turn to old and current media to support a feeling of chronology imbued with nostalgia. New materials such as mirror, aluminum composite plates, frames, digital paintings and classic paintings, are all ways that I use to seal my portraits out of time, in order to immortalize a figure or a style shortly.

Reflection and mirror effects serve to incorporate the viewer's eye into the work. A way of integrating one's subjective interpretation according to one's history. Indeed, the gaze is the most important variable in this quest for introspection, it integrates the spectator into this global universe and encourages him to take part in its hybridizations. The restitution of my work is also uchronic and converges on several temperate and symbiotic realities. Bringing these different visions into dialogue and existing in a parallel universe would be the ideal of fantasy.

My Questions

The notion of Identity appeals to me through self-awareness, of one's individuality and one's singularity even as we become standardized. But also identity through its identification with a group, a community, for a mixed person in a multicultural society.

Humans and their bodily envelope inspire me, because it is from them that the question of identity takes root. It was therefore naturally that I began to work on portraiture, and it is through it that I seek to question these cultural heritages. Through my works I seek to define, construct, identify or disidentify cultural myths normalized by conscious and unconscious clichés.

With my own complex multicultural heritage, I come to question my own identity construction, and I invite the viewer to do the same. “I am everyone, and everywhere at home. Of plural affiliations and ethnic hybridizations.”

I use so-called “ethnic” visual markers full of prejudices and stereotypes that I subvert. I play with anything that “represents” preconceived ideas related to race, sexuality, beliefs, or clothing style. The fantasies linked to everything that is ethnicized, the connoted symbols and the old clichés. That I appropriate and seek to reconstruct in another fiction.

This inevitably leads to a hybridization of genres and styles, temporalities are rewritten and the contemporary mixes happily with the 28th or 19th century. The juxtaposition of working techniques joins that of Identities. Like an extension of my genetics, everything must blend together.

My Technique

I define my creation as “Graphic’Art” through the creative process. It is a juxtaposition of different techniques of plastic expression. Digital art which uses image creation software, associated with so-called classic representation techniques, namely: acrylic paint, pencils, ballpoint pens, aerosol paints, etc. My technique experiments with different supports, different mediums, different materials as well as different scales of creation.

The production resulting from this mixture gives a final result that I consider to be in my image: mixed.

I use digital art using several image creation software, but also the printer and the scanner which allow the link to the virtual. A drawing made with markers in A5 format, once scanned, can become the background of a canvas of one meter by two meters for example. An acrylic painting can be reworked into a digital painting, end up on wood and finished one last time with paint.

There are no predefined steps or order to follow. I choose the supports according to the portrait; canvas, aluminum, wood, mirror or plexiglass. The different technical layers overlap and create a unique, contemporary style of writing that reflects my image.

There is a close relationship between my technique and my artistic approach, directly linked to my questions of identity. This creative process which is specific to me is similar to Russian roulette, there is an element of surprise when we think of crossover with surprising and different results.

This element of the unexpected undoubtedly echoes the game of chance of genetic heredity, which defines the individuality of each person and therefore of each of my creations. It's a part of uncontrollable mystery with good and bad surprises. The possibilities are therefore limitless, almost infinite, and the writing becomes more complex as the layers thicken.

I add tangible material with acrylic, then I add virtual material with my graphics tablet. The result of the two writings concretizes a certain idea of the virtual/real relationship which inspires me.

Creation steps