OLIVIER KENNEYBREW / French-American, born in 1987
WORKS
THE COLORS OF THE STREETS
Olivier Kenneybrew was born in 1987 in Montpellier, France, to a French mother and an American father, into a family where books and culture played a central role. As a child, he loved to draw and create things with his hands, a passion that would stay with him forever. His early adult years were spent studying landscape architecture and painting graffiti in the streets of Montpellier. Under his street artist name “Polar,” he began with classic lettering work, quickly moving on to naive and figurative compositions, and finally settling on clean, synthetic forms, cultivating a strong taste for explosive colors.
His travels - numerous, ever farther, ever longer - are his main source of inspiration. He evokes them in increasingly abstract poetic compositions, giving pride of place to Nature and the different types of vegetation he has observed here and there. Far from being inert, his Nature diffuses waves of enveloping roundness, spreading out in large visual swathes of contemporary psychedelia. His works whisper moments of life to passersby, sometimes very personal, sometimes more universal, with which everyone can identify. He sees his creations as vectors of cohesion and social exchange, like a meeting point between different cultures, different people, between local residents and passing visitors.
Noticed by the art world and institutions, since 2013 he has responded to numerous public and private commissions (building facades, sports fields, street furniture, corporate buildings, etc.) in France and around the world. His art then spread in the form of large geometric frescoes on the facades of cities in Ireland, Colombia, Mexico, and New Zealand.
Waterford, Ireland
Buritaca, Colombia
Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico
The artist at work
Montpellier, France
Paris, France
FROM WALLS TO EASELS
His reputation as a muralist is established, the commissions are coming in, everything could continue as it is...
However, Olivier Kenneybrew's creativity needs new challenges to flourish. Perhaps with age (the artist is now in his thirties), he wants to take on another challenge, one that is both immense and quite modest: that of painting the intimate. “My transition from outdoor murals to studio work reflects a desire to take my painting into a new dimension: that of memory. From the free and abstract world of murals, I feel myself sliding towards more realistic and introspective canvases.”
From facades to easels, from outside to inside. Starting in 2019, within the four walls of his studio, where the murmur of the street is barely audible, the painter began a new chapter in his work. Nature is no longer seen as a motif but as a subject. The shapes become undulating, the lights are softened, and the bright colors blend into subtle shades. Acrylics are no longer used; oil paint prevails for its vibrant and profound character. With delicate touches and layers of material, he conjures up moments from his daily life, his travels, and his sensitive view of places he visits regularly or just once, by chance along the way. Passed through the limbo of memory, his landscapes are transformed into fantastical visions, taking on the dreamlike quality of a Gauguin in Brittany or a Georgia O'Keeffe facing her New Mexico desert... Aesthetic and spiritual contemplation. The fire of his youthful graffiti has given way to calm. The silence becomes palpable, disturbed only in the distance by the wind rustling through the pine trees.
Olivier Kenneybrew has not forgotten his past experiments: “Each painting is still based on a geometric construction that gradually gives rise to a landscape.” He now articulates a dialogue between two legacies: that of an urban, immediate, and frontal graphic approach, and that of landscape painting drawing on the sources of a classical pictorial tradition. This dual heritage gives rise to his own identity, which is both serene and strikingly free.
Workshop view
"Toc al mar" (detail)
Workshop view