URBAN PLANNER ARTIST
Sébastien Mehal paints the urban world from a human perspective. He reflects on exile, humanity and the complexity of the human condition in a world in perpetual evolution. Like the bridges he created between continents in his personal history, his painting is carried by movement. Each of his paintings is a succession of overlapping layers whose final phase is executed with a syringe, industrial for large formats, surgical for small. By working certain parts of his canvases, he shows, not the projection of paint or resin, but the impact of the jet, in abstract compositions that capture the memory of his gesture.
Born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, from a mixed family, Sébastien Mehal moved to Paris at the age of 18 to study architecture and then entered the ESRA – Ecole supérieure de réalisation audiovisuelle – from which he graduated in 2000. He then moved to Austria for a few years before moving back to Paris where he lived and worked. From his childhood in Martinique, he was strongly marked by the architectural evolution of Trénelle, a working-class and self-constructed district of Fort-de-France, ressembling the Brazilian favelas. He witnessed the metamorphosis of this district where small individual houses gradually gave way to concrete structures. This is what led him to study architecture and then, realizing that he was not meant to «destroy in order to rebuild», he turned to audiovisual production and scenography training, before choosing his path as an urban planner artist.