Kevin Goreau                                        About     FR   EN   ES                

 
Biography

Born in 1992, Kevin Goreau is a French visual artist based in Mexico City. He graduated from the École supérieure des beaux-arts d’Angers in 2016 and also studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden, Germany. His work has been featured in several exhibitions in France and Mexico, notably in Nantes, Paris, and Mexico City. In 2022, he presented his solo exhibition Le Rocher de l’Oubli in Nantes. He has also participated in collective projects, independent publications, and collaborations in the field of illustration. Alongside his artistic practice, he has been teaching visual arts since 2018.

Démarche artistique

I imagine the body as a castle, an inner architecture made up of chambers, towers, passageways, and hidden places where memories and emotions reside. Through painting and sculpture, I give form to this realm, whose geography I uncover through the course of my creations. Within this universe, anatomy, landscape, and architecture transform into one another. A cave takes on the features of a face, a portrait merges with a façade, and flesh can become indistinguishable from stone. Each work forms an autonomous fragment of a larger whole whose elements echo one another.

I collect discarded cardboard from the street, which I cut, assemble, and paint to create polychrome architectural forms, sometimes combined with figurative paintings set within sculpted frames. Tales, legends, and myths nourish my compositions, in which colour and ornament contribute both to the staging and to the symbolism of the images. I draw on medieval art, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the aesthetic of toys to explore shifts in scale, the inventiveness of miniature worlds, and the theatricality of settings, while cultivating a handmade practice rooted in human gesture and in the pursuit of beauty.

To this work with material is added the work of fiction, through which I reinvent memories and lived experiences without confining them to an autobiographical narrative. From this meeting of individual memory and collective imagination emerges a personal mythology, in which the fancifulness of the settings contrasts with the gravity of the figures, while the marvelous coexists with the unsettling and the sacred. In this way, I seek to reveal the strangeness hidden beneath the most familiar appearances. Through these metamorphoses, I express my desire to re-enchant reality, giving inner life the form of a kingdom and abandoned material the preciousness of an imaginary palace.