by
Photo: L’Atlas
L’Atlas aka Jules Dedet Granel, is going through a period of personal introspection. He released a monograph published by Skira last year — the most comprehensive book on his work to date. In it, he highlights his subjects of predilection: abstraction, gesture, and geometry.
Now, he’s taking stock of his artistic career over the past 25 years and contemplating his next steps.
The mid-career artist no longer asks himself what he hopes the viewer will take away from his work. “It’s not that I don’t care what people think or feel, but I’m more focused on my own feelings — what my art will bring me,” he divulges.
“It’s me whom I want to seduce, and the challenge is to continue enjoying creating,” L’Atlas adds. “There will always be people who like it and others who don’t. Today, I’m more interested in having practical or technical discussions with other painters, seeing how they work, and understanding their process. It’s more the intrinsic question of painting itself — how and why you do things. I’m in a period where I need to renourish myself by going to museums, artist studios, and travelling again.”
L’Atlas, Circutus, 2022, 137 x 61 cm on display at the exhibition Get in Line at Galerie At Down in Montpellier in June – July 2023. (Photo: L’Atlas)
The evolution of L’Atlas’ craftsmanship
We’re standing in the middle of L’Atlas’ atelier on the outskirts of Paris where he’s telling me about his latest creations for his solo show, Get in Line, which just came to a close at Galerie At Down in Montpellier in the south of France.
With works priced at up to 15,000 euros (S$22,116), it celebrated 20 years of friendship between gallery founder Nicolas Pinelli and L’Atlas and a decade of collaboration. “At Down is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and we’ve exhibited L’Atlas since the beginning because I admire his work,” Pinelli tells me. “We’re the same age and have followed each other’s respective paths. 20 years ago, I was a journalist and had already detected his emerging talent and interviewed him for the cover of my magazine, Last Mag. Today, he’s a key figure in contemporary urban art who never ceases to leave his mark on this artistic movement.”
L’Atlas, Still Alive, 2023, 100 x 100 cm, on display at the exhibition Get in Line at Galerie At Down in Montpellier in June – July 2023. (Photo: L’Atlas)
For the exhibition, L’Atlas introduced a new technique to his Fades and Drips series where he inversed his usual process.
Rather than starting by painting the background and laying down strips of tape over it that he peels off to reveal his stylised signature, he began with a pink-blue fade that formed the backdrop of the skinny horizontal and vertical lines of his letters composed of tape, then covered the canvas in white, then black arched brushstrokes, before removing the tape.
Whereas black or white was previously reserved for the letters and colour for the spaces between them, he decided to switch them out.
Reinventing calligraphy
French artist, L’Atlas, in his studio in Les Lilas. (Photo: L’Atlas)
Born in Toulouse in 1978, L’Atlas’ roots may have originated on the streets in the 1990s when he tagged everything in sight, but his style has since evolved beyond graffiti. Today, he fuses the optical, abstract, minimalist, and geometric art movements with his research on writing and calligraphy to produce an original typography.
With the aim of creating a universal pictorial language, he has successfully embedded the history of writing into the history of art and brought optical art inside graffiti.
Instantly recognisable, his name is injected into virtually all of his works, at times blindingly obvious and at other times indecipherable, while superimposing gesture on geometry to have diverse art movements converse with one another.
L’Atlas, Paris Pékin, 2009, 200 x 200 cm, sold by Artcurial auction house in Paris in 2013. (Photo: Artcurial)
Auctioneer and urban art specialist at Paris-based auction house Artcurial, Arnaud Oliveux, who has closely watched L’Atlas since the 2006 launch of Artcurial’s sales in this discipline, has observed how his results have steadily risen, with most lots stabilising around 5,000 to 10,000 euros.
From his first auction piece in 2007 selling for just a few hundred euros, his canvases thereafter rapidly achieved several thousand euros, with strong demand starting in 2008 and peaking at 12,870 euros for the painting Paris Pékin in 2013.
“The demand for L’Atlas’ work is probably related to the fact that it transcends the lines of urban art and is immediately identifiable,” notes Oliveux.
“He is certainly an actor of the urban art scene, but his work really visually dialogues with the more classic contemporary art scene through his recurring geometric vocabulary evoking the letter. One qualifies his style as a labyrinth sometimes, but it is especially a form of writing, a variation of the name ‘L’Atlas’ in games of optical reconstitution, which brings it closer to optical-geometric art.”
L’Atlas, Eternal Signs, 2018, marble, displayed at Musée en Herbe museum in Paris in 2019 – 2020. (Photo: L’Atlas)
Art that transcends borders
Explaining the importance of resituating urban art as an essential form of contemporary art rather than a separate category, Oliveux underlines that L’Atlas is the link that binds the two. He cites L’Atlas’ 2019 exhibition at the Parisian children’s museum, Musée en Herbe, as a seminal moment because “it is extremely important to allow the youngest public to look at art and to reflect”.
L’Atlas, Boussoles, esplanade of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, 2008. (Photo: L’Atlas)
The giant ground compass L’Atlas created for the plaza of Paris’ Centre Pompidou was another milestone, successfully creating a link between art and its urban context. Having spotted his talent from the start, French fashion designer Agnès b. offered him his first gallery show in 2001 and is among his most loyal collectors. She has nine of his works in her art collection at her exhibition space, La Fab, in Paris.
Today, he continues to design capsule collections for her label, which are released annually.
L’Atlas, Shapes #2, 2013, spray paint on wood, 280 x 160 cm, unique piece in the Agnès b. art collection. Courtesy of the Collection Agnès b.
Florian Neveu, curator of the Solid’Art Paris art fair that honoured L’Atlas last April, points out, “What I like about L’Atlas is his artistic approach: By studying calligraphy in several countries, he has created his own original universal scripts that he adapts to all mediums, from canvas to the public space.”
L’Atlas’ booth at the Solid’Art Paris art fair in April 2023. (Photo: Théo Pitout)
Neveu adds that L’Atlas is a generous artist in his art and in his life, as demonstrated by his patronage of the second edition of Solid’Art Paris that raised 110,000 euros in support of Secours Populaire, a French charity fighting against poverty and discrimination.
He concludes, “Thanks to the graphic universality of L’Atlas’ approach, his art is of interest to many collectors, and I think it’s precisely because his work erases borders that his reputation is international.”
