“On my way to Idem centenary workshops to make my first lithography with Print Them All, I wanted to go back to the fundamentals of my practice: ink, brush, gold drops, a few gestures and a hint of alchemy. Working on my first solo show ‘Ars Longa Vita Brevis’ with Richard Lefeuvre gallery in Geneva, I kept exploring some ways that I have been pursuing inside my studio for months, or from writing – and especially the tag – to slowly deconstruct the letter and keep a movement, a serie of cursive fragments. Thus, thanks to the talent and patience of Idem lithographers, we spent long days meticulously reproducing this fluid mantra wih abstract color by color , working with acid out of the workshop aluminum plates to get the perfect finishing” Sowat
Sowat made his first paintings on railways, highways and wasteland of Marseille. As a DMV member, he develops a work inspired by Cholo calligraphy – Chaz Bojorquez graffiti, Latino art gangs used to delimitate their territories in Los Angeles. His first meeting with Lek in 2009 marked the beginning of their “Mausolée” project, a disused supermarket in Aubervilliers they invested with forty graffiti artists.
In this wild artistic residency, Sowat confirms his taste for the visual and staging, signing the realization of the “Mausolée” movie. At the Palais de Tokyo, the duo performed secretly traces “Direct”, a movie about the rise and destruction in graffiti, inviting twenty artists coming secretly drawing on a blackboard of the institution.
He also worked on a project with Lek in 2016 at Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome when it celebrated its 350th anniversary. They created an amazing video mapping with light projections on the villa.
Sowat is represented by the gallery Le Feuvre & Roze since 2014.
