
James Dosa
I was born in 1996 in Paris. I pursued professional training in furniture craftsmanship at the École Boulle, as well as training in graphic design and image printing at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris. I am currently a student at the Beaux-Arts de Paris.
My artistic work is characterized by a deep emotional contradiction, influenced by theories on the psychic construction of childhood as well as by Saudade, a Portuguese word describing a complex and difficult-to-translate feeling, which is a mix of nostalgia, sadness, and desire. This feeling drives me to explore past events and create works that oscillate between reality and abstraction, blending desired memories and nostalgic realities.
I grew up in a small apartment with my mother, where I saw accumulations of objects that shaped my way of perceiving space and forms. It is this structure and these accumulations that I explore in my artistic practice to understand their form and origin.
Hervé Télémaque, Philip Guston, and Michel Majerus are among the artists who have inspired me. To create this universe, I use different mediums that I layer, one upon the other. I draw from the graphic, digital, and colorimetric codes of popular culture, from everyday observation, and from memory to create a world that reflects the thoughts and questions that emerge day after day.
This exploration of my childhood experience is motivated by absence and the quest for answers, which have created in me the need to return to my childhood memories.
I was fortunate to inherit a video game console at a very young age, an object that has become central to my artistic process. I establish a dialogue between virtual, memory-based, and real spaces in my pictorial works to explore this relationship between the immaterial world and the real world.
In short, my artistic work is an introspective exploration of my years between childhood and adolescence, confronted with the present temporality. I use the structure and accumulations of objects and ideas to create works that establish connections between the addressed issues. I mobilize the codes of the popular universe and my memory to explore my reflections and questions.