Lucas S. JEAN

A self-taught artist born in 1999, from Karukera, the original name of Guadeloupe. A descendant of deported Africans and of the Kalinago people, he founded SEYMR® in 2018 and places his work within the decolonial movement in the arts: taking back an intangible heritage that colonisation covered over.

It seeks to conceptualise an art movement, Optical Abstraction, conceived as a crossroads where visual arts, linguistics, history, social sciences, metaphysics, anthropology and politics meet. The line gives body to waves and beams; geometry supplies their measure.

The black of the ink stands for the Nun, the primordial ocean; the white of the paper, the space where form appears. Each work passes through three stages. Capture: see the whole composition before the first stroke. Anchor: draw it in one gesture, with no going back. Radiate: let it act on the place that receives it.

The forms start from an observation of Caribbean nature, take a principle from Kemetic thought, then become a gesture. Bamboo gives the Axial Blade, the queen conch shell the Logarithmic Spiral, the mangrove roots the Latent Grid.

His sources are the works of Cheikh Anta Diop, Théophile Obenga and Mbog Bassong. His reading of hieroglyphs follows the Kuma Method of Toti Dibombari Mbock and Akiri Sylla, contested by academic Egyptology; he stands by this choice.

He runs the House on his own: he draws, writes the texts, designs the editions and answers every request himself. He also hosts Éklad’Art, a weekly programme on art and culture in Guadeloupe, on Canal 10.

A truer reality, one line at a time.