L'Atlas

An L’Atlas composition begins with writing, but recognition is not its endpoint. Letters lengthen into corridors, repeated strokes build a grid and the spaces between them become as active as the painted marks. A name turns into an image that can be followed without being deciphered. This movement between reading and looking gives his work its distinctive optical tension.

Born Jules Dedet Granel in Toulouse in 1978, L’Atlas entered the Paris graffiti scene during the 1990s. His interest in lettering led him to study calligraphic traditions through travel in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. He gradually brought that knowledge into dialogue with geometric abstraction and minimalism, developing studio work alongside interventions in the city.

The apparent precision of his paintings does not exclude accident. Tape and spray paint establish sharp boundaries, while washes, drips and expansive gestures complicate the surface beneath. Black and white remain important, but color introduces other relationships between depth, light and structure. Across canvases and printed editions, the repeated sign becomes a way to explore differences rather than produce an identical image.

Public space is another scale of the same inquiry. Ground works and monumental façades turn the act of looking into a bodily experience, while the photographic project Toiles errantes places paintings within urban settings. His retrospective Mundus Meus at the Musée du Touquet-Paris-Plage in 2025–2026 brought these approaches together. He also participated in the Petit Palais group exhibition WE ARE [still] HERE in 2026. A bilingual monograph published by Skira in 2022 documents the breadth of his practice.

Markowicz Fine Art’s selection brings this larger investigation back to the individual painting or print. Technique, scale and the balance between line and surface offer different ways into an art that asks the viewer to look beyond the familiar shape of a signature.