KEAN

Jordan Tran, alos known as Kean, was born in 1988 and currently lives and works in Mulhouse. He is a French painter. Initially, Kean showcased his creative talent in urban spaces as a graffiti artist. Gradually, he moved away from the walls of the city to focus on canvas painting. His abstract landscapes impress with their immaculate perfection of gradients. Presented in vast and enticing ranges of colours, they immerse us in different atmospheres, each exuding a rare sensuality. His works are the result of a method patiently developed, intertwined with his various artistic practices. 

Initially, Kean was fascinated by the Colo gradients that enlivened the backgrounds of his graffiti, on which he began to focus, gradually abandoning lettering. The artist also felt the need to capture through photography the intense sensations triggered by the sight of a landscape, the contemplation of distant horizons, and the observation of subtle variations of light and colours in the sky throughout the day and night. Photography led Kean to develop formal constants for his painting, such as dividing the surface with a-horizon line at the lower third of the composition, as well as framing his canvases with white margins, like a print.

Kean's paintings showcase a great mastery of gradients, which he expresses in a very nuanced way through subtle colour blending. These colours overlap in thin layers of paint, to blend into each other seamlessly. This long and patient process gives the artist’s abstract landscapes their density, evoking the deep blue of a night sky, the orange yellow of a scorching summer sun, or the rosy hues of a sunrise. Kean's paintings are an invitation to escape, with the canvas symbolically serving as a window opening onto another world. The transition from the real world to the imaginary and dreamlike world materialized by the artist through the contours that surround his gradients, abstractly recalling the oval shape of a porthole, the quadrangular shape of a window, or the vertical shape of a door.

Self-taught, Kean has developed a highly personal approach that has led him from graffiti to abstraction. His expertise in gradients and colour nuances is endowed with a strong emotional power, encouraging the viewer to dream and contemplate. In this regard, Kean’s works are part of the legacy of the American Colour Field movement, but above all the California Light and Space movement, whose artists, such as the famous James Turrell, have made the study of perceptual phenomena, particularly light and space, central to their concerns.