Turned On, The social landscape Print

Sebastien Waknine absorbs heterogeneous elements that come from both ancestral cultures and graffiti pioneers, combining pictographs with totemic references, loans from esoteric imagery and winks at abstract expressionism or art brut. Witnessing what inspires the Artist throughout this iconographic collection, Waknine composes plastic universes where the apocalyptic and redeeming tone often coexist. On the very same pictorial surface we see scenes of birth and death, violence and salvation, Sanity and Insanity. There is a strong admiration and fascination with millenary cultures, African tribes to American Indians with their sacredness of masks and rituals. This the artist reinterprets through portraits of zoomorphic or human iconic figures, thus creating his own pantheon of gods, heroes and demons. The chromatic saturation and the deformation of the features impregnate those faces of hieratic crudity. They make up a gallery of teratological beings that arouse horror and tenderness simultaneously, inhabitants of an archaic age, of a posthuman future or of a world parallel to ours. Anna Adell