Biography
Gilbert Petit is an artist-painter born in Lomé (Togo), in 1971. Plastic artist (painter, illustrator, graphic designer), he is also artistic director of the collective Twelve twelve.
He co-created, with the members of the M.A.C collective, the first international festival of urban graphic arts in France: Kosmopolite (2002/2008); and with artist Jaimito the performance Akrylonumerik (multimedia performance mixing digital art and Street art).
Gilbert Petit proceeds from a creative process in different stages. He first uses sketches that make an idea tangible, but it just helps him open his creativity, it is a prerequisite, because then other creative objectives take over. For some drawings with colored pencils or pastels, the compositions are random: one form calls for another and forces its “sense” of composition for a moving and organic association. These are instinctive compositions, the elements are always the same, but are not always nested in the same way. For other creations, Gilbert Petit elaborates the scenes from old images which he builds with pure pigments, solvents, chalk, sprays, markers, scotch tape, stickers. Gilbert Petit freely invests the canvas and chooses these mediums for their unconscious forces, linked to a subtle organic creation.