Now featuring Julien Kedryna

Print #1 for Little Paper Planes

This week Little Paper Planes is excited to present two new exclusive prints from invited French artist Julien Kedryna! I recently got to discover more about this hardworking Parisian’s interests, process, and bundle of goings-ons through a series of emails. Please read on.

Hi Julien, welcome to Little Paper Planes. Thanks in advance for answering a few questions about your self and your work. How’s this day in Paris going for you?

Hello Jess! I’m fine, even if today I did a lot of work! I’ve moved into a new studio, but it’s difficult to start making art in it right now, cause there’s still a lot of boxes everywhere.

Where else have you lived in your life, or gone to school?

I was born in Metz, in eastern France, where I studied art, history of art, and, at the end, scenography. I came to Paris in January 2007.

Julien’s wished-for studio

Can you please talk about scenography a little? Did this involve constructing sets and costumes?

It was really nice to learn about this fantastic job!

When I came to Paris, I had a short period of work experience. I don’t feel concerned at all about sets and costumes- I was concerned with the scenography of exhibitions. It’s a very very interesting profession. You are in relation with a lot of teams, which are working on the same project: designers, builders, the owners of the museum or the curators of the exhibition, etc. You have to think about the space depending on the artistic or cultural contents of the museum or exhibition. It was a rich experience and I really liked this. But even if it’s exciting, it’s more than a full time job. And I need time for myself to draw and for making my own projects, even if they are less important than the ones I could work for in a scenography studio. At the beginning of this period of work experience in this Parisian scenography studio, they asked me to work for them…not as a scenographer but as a drawer, for a museum we were working for. So I made a bunch of drawings for a piece in the permanent exhibition of the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (National Museum of History of Immigration), a museum that underlines the richness of a melted society.

So even if I loved to work as a scenographer (building scale models, thinking about space, trying to find solutions on a specific lighting), I chose to make my own stuff. Not really a choice, because as I told you, the fact is that if I had chosen scenography, I would have had to say goodbye to all my other activities. And I love them more than all.

beloved activity

I’m glad you did the right thing. Can you share what it’s like to live in what the rest of the world knows as The City of Light?

In fact, nobody here calls Paris ‘the City of Light.’  It’s more the pollution and the crazy people that define Paris today! But I love to live in Paris anyways, because I have direct access to its culture and to the drawing exhibitions in particular. Some of my friends run really nice parties, and there is always something to do if you want to go out. And most of all, I’ve met a lot of incredible people here, artists and musicians, who became my friends. That’s why, despite the fact that it’s often hard to pay the bills, I’m still living here today!

How do you pay those bills, if I may ask?

I am a teacher at a secondary school for now…

How would you describe the contemporary art scene in Paris or France in general? Do you think its long and rich art history exerts a presence on your work?

It’s hard for me to describe the contemporary art scene, considering the fact that I mostly know what’s going on in the drawing scene, which is kinda small. I know a lot of artists who are making their own editions, with their own money, and who are drawing all the time. I’m more interested in this underground scene than in what I can see in huge national museums. Even though I studied the history of art in college, it’s more what happens nowadays in my circle which exerts a presence on my work.

drawing entitled Prison

How would you describe your motivation to make things, then? What’s your favorite medium? And can you tell us more about the range of work you produce? I’ve seen silkscreens, small models, hundreds of abstract drawings…

My working practice has several aspects. In one hand, I make very spontaneous drawings, totally rash and idiotic. I love the borderline side of badly made things, because for me there’s an obvious beauty in it. Mediocrity and stupidity are fascinating to me. Nowadays I am less into this kind of drawings. My digital collages are taking over from this way of thinking and creating.

On the other hand, my abstract work is very methodical, although it is not calculated at all. It’s based on shape games, depending on the tools that I use. I love to use a medium by playing with its specificities: watercolor melts, felt-tip leaves a mark, acrylic smears, ink disperses… I try to make use of these graphical potentials by creating direct confrontations between their material effects. This abstract work is actually based on very simple graphical symbols but which have to do with my own life. If the graphic elements are linked together, if some shapes are abstracted, it’s often unconsciously but never innocently. A thought or a feeling is generally at the root of my drawings.

And if I had to choose a favorite medium, it would be felt-tips, for sure!

Print #2 for Little Paper Planes

Why is it that your interest has shifted somewhat from spontaneous drawings to digital collages?

I think that I have become more and more obsessed about some formal questions with my abstract drawings, and it makes me forget the rest. Also, I have become more and more clean and technical, and I’m sure that today I could not make the same mistakes I used to make in my stupid drawings, which is sad because I loved to make approximated drawings, to fail on a detail, to be clumsy. But that’s the opposite of what I’m working on with my abstract drawings. So the way I found to come back at something like this was the digital collage. I could finally make something really stupid again, and just having the pleasure of creating an incongruous picture, spontaneously guided by a desire to shift, to push the bounds of good taste, and to have fun…

digital collage: printed out in B&W, held upside down, photographed, re-righted

Maybe speaking of fun… I read that you’ve been a member of the collective Modele Puissance (‘Power Model’ in English) since 2008, where you make group drawings that “produce confrontations.” Can you tell me more about how you came to be, and your activities as a collective?

Yes, we created the collective Modèle Puissance in 2008 with Vanessa Dziuba, Jean-Philippe Bretin and Nicolas Nadé. We all make drawings in a same way of thinking. If you look at our website, you’ll see that the drawings are displayed by series, and not by name of artist. We are sharing many common points through our respective works. Each of us are very independent, and each one of us has his or her own personal projects. Modèle Puissance is the meeting of our respective works.  We don’t produce common drawings together, for example. Maybe it will happen one day, but for now, we are in personal researches. The activities of MP consist of making exhibitions and editions together. We’ve done one book all together, Random, and it displays our works with each person’s printed on a different paper, so the author is coded and known. The book is also built in a random way- we printed more drawings than what are featured in any one copy and they also appear in a completely different order, so the result is that each one of the 100 books is unique. 20 of the 100 books also contain an original drawing.

So we really love making editions and we pay attention to the way we make it. In a book like Random, each detail is prepared by advance. My latest book is called Our God Is An Awesome God, and it’s a postcard book which displays stupid digital collages. It had to be a postcard book and not just another kind of book. We also love to make exhibitions, and thinking together about how to show our work. The last one was Mon Singe, at Espace My Monkey in Nancy, France. We decided to work around three axis: drawing, books, and installation. With the installation it was a nice challenge to think about our drawings in three dimensions, using the space of the gallery.

the publication Random by Modele Puissance

What are you working towards or looking forwards to most right now?

It’s been a little while since I made new drawings. I am more into a new editorial project, Collection Revue, that we run with Sammy Stein, Marine Le Saout and two of my friends from MP, Jean-Philippe Bretin and Vanessa Dziuba. Collection is a contemporary drawing-oriented magazine, which uses texts and pictures. We all are drawers, and we decided to get together in order to interact with artists, collectors, gallery owners and publishers with a view to demonstrate the versatility of our medium. The magazine, written in French and English, will be out in May.
We also organize exhibitions at the Kiosque/Images art gallery (105 rue Oberkampf 75011 Paris) all year-round. We have shown the works of Ludovic Boulard Le Fur and his brother Jérémy, and recently the ones of Massimilano Bomba and Thomas Isaia.
Then I will also be showing my drawings in Barcelona at ROJO®artspace with the French artist Arnaud Loumeau. We were both invited by Rojo Books. I also have another show planned in Milan later in the year.

And then we can finally do some new projects with Modèle Puissance ! I also made two prints for the website Little Paper Planes, but I guess you already know that!

It’s true! Thanks very much for that Julien, and for corresponding with me.

-Jess