XEES

© Photo: XEES

An artist from Tours, Xees is one of those whom no marked path can contain. After a year in the mysteries of medicine, then another touching on the frameworks of design, he chose to break free. It is art that calls to him - a visceral, unruly art, where the aim is not to represent, but to reveal. Self-taught, in the manner of Basquiat, from whom he claims spiritual affiliation, Xees establishes himself as a raw creator, a free spirit whose work is forged through instinctive impulses, organic explorations, and confrontations with matter.

His paintings always emerge from the same point: the eye. This organ of encounter, of vulnerability, becomes for Xees the threshold of dialogue between himself and his surface. " Drawing eyes is creating contact with the canvas ," he says. From then on, the rest can be constructed—or rather, deconstructed. For anatomy in Xees' work obeys no academic logic: it fragments, deconstructs, twists in a plastic grammar where flesh becomes language and bodies become unstable territories.

His figures—sometimes humanoid, often monstrous—emerge from simple forms: squares, streaks, and straight lines that metamorphose into fangs, claws, or dissonant organs. This aggressive geometry, however, is matched by a surprising chromatic softness. Xees is colorblind. This handicap, far from restricting his practice, sharpens his colorful instinct: he works in clear, unmixed flat tints, with a palette reduced to the essentials.

For Xees, each canvas is a struggle. A hand-to-hand struggle between the desire for form and accident, between the rigor of the line and the brutality of the impulse. To create is to surpass oneself, he asserts. We sense this tension in his works: nothing is tranquil, everything is an attempt, a fracture, a reconquest. And yet, something resists the collapse—perhaps this quest for contact, this way he has of seeking the other through his painted gaze, of striving toward a possible humanity in assumed monstrosity.