Manuel Fernandez, alias KiKo, is a French artist who was born in 1985 in Martigues, a town near Marseilles known as the ‘Provençal Venice’, which inspires his Mediterranean colours and more particularly this burning orange that is so present in many of his works.
KiKo has always had a taste for drawing. As a child, people said that for him drawing was as easy as breathing. With a single firm line, he sketched the emotions that he could not express with words. At school, he was only interested in art class and it seemed his path was already marked out. But art was never the topic of conversation in this family of sailors whose first love was the sea, and tuna fishing in particular. From an early age, KiKo was on the family tuna boats, 30m-long giants of the seas moored in Port-Vendres, exchanging his pencils for fishing nets; he couldn’t just abandon ship! When he was older, he spent long months at sea hunting down banks of fish colonised by tuna. There, he learned discipline, resilience, teamwork, how to control his fear, go without sleep, and be alone. To escape this tough sailors’ life, and the sea that constantly kept him in check, KiKo created an imaginary world where childhood, suspended in time, would inspire all his artwork.
Meeting his wife was a critical moment. She came from a family of artists and his father-in-law soon opened the doors of his studio to him. He then returned to his passion for art and tried out different media on increasingly large canvases. It was the multicoloured Chinese inks that were to make their mark on KiKo. Drawn to their fluidity, he decided not to use them on the traditional paper but on canvas. They gave him a unique signature that reconciles street art with expressionism, and favours emotion over reality. Trails of black Chinese ink running down a canvas, symbolically reminding us of tears or blood, testify to a sadness that gently contrasts with the gaiety of his coloured backgrounds.
Please Wait...
