Whether on walls or canvas, Sowat's paintings always assign us the same place: in front of his arrangements, our eyes become recognition software and, scanning the drawing, we see, alternately and sometimes simultaneously, topographical maps, geological sections, biological growths or cosmic reliefs.
In this profusion of correspondences, one referent nevertheless dominates: the letter. Line by line, stroke by stroke, Sowat's compositions calligraphy an unknown language. But whereas the pictorial abstraction of the 1950s, all too happy to have liberated the written word from meaning, pushed writing to its limits and made the alphabet go wild until it was unrecognisable, Sowat maintains an organic link with the text. In all his paintings, the trace of the sign persists like a spectre: the paintings unfold as stanzas, the drawings as verses, and the strokes as jambs.
It's hard not to link this consubstantial link with the written word to Sowat's native graffiti culture. From tags to frescoes, the name, the signature, is always placed at the centre of the compositions, and even if, in his work as a graffiti artist, Sowat very quickly moved away from these canons in favour of other, more abstract forms, they remain fundamental to his grammar'.
- Philippe Vasset, author
Born in 1978, Sowat is a Franco-American graffiti artist and Urbex enthusiast. With his friend Lek, he forms the duo Lek & Sowat. Together they have developed a contextual and conceptual approach to graffiti and site-specific painting. This has taken them to the Palais de Tokyo, the Centre Pompidou, the Villa Médicis and the Opéra de Lyon, among others. This link with institutions is quite rare, and gives Sowat and his work a special dimension. Both in and out of the studio, he focuses on calligraphy.
He discovered calligraphy when he was a teenager in California, thanks to cholo, a specific graffiti practice first developed by gangs in Latin and South America.
Cholo has had a major influence on the Californian graffiti scene and, formally, is more akin to drawn letters than a signature, more typical of New York and East Coast graffiti. Since his first solo exhibition (2014, 'Ars Longa Vita Brevis', Richard & Le Feuvre gallery, Geneva), Sowat has been evolving his calligraphy on canvas. He perfects, refines, chisels his line often enhanced with metallic paint, gold, bronze, silver, mixed with oil.
With 'One Day At A Time', the artist presents a new series of works with a light, fluid line and absolutely mastered strokes. The metallic paint is still present, to underline the passages in ink and acrylic, but it is now more in the form of a 'light' or 'dark' colour.
