Paintings

Born in 1980 in Lyon. Lives and works in Paris.

"If I had to evoke Yaze's work in one word, I would abruptly use that of 'tear'. I don't know if this is quite appropriate to account for a work in the making and already imposing, but what immediately comes to mind in front of these immense portraits at the same time traced and destroyed, constructed and crossed out, underlying and enriched with scars, but always present, haunting, in their initial vigor. appearance as if their meaning could only appear in the addition of two contradictory and at the same time complementary elements. Two elements: a drawing (a design), and an existence. Flashes of blood red, bursts of fire from the orange, terrestrial evidence of ocher, pearlescent whites superimposed on the precise lines of the black line. Sometimes the writing in its magic brings a discreet and necessary note. Mysterious too.
We perceive in this creative torrent a violence that the artist has already redacted on the facades, vertical and free spaces of cities, the leprous walls of car parks and blackened stations. Graffiti and tags were Yassine “Yaze” Mekhnache's first writing exercises. As for Jean-Michel Basquiat who began in the streets of Soho the cruel and bewitching saga of Samo before Andy Warhol gave him the taste to paint on canvases. In certain respects, reading his impressive paintings, I place Yaze in the family of immense artists who are for me Cy Twombly - where the unspoken, the suggested, create poetry; Georges Baselitz - whose power overturns the norms; Yan Pei-Ming - which translates the savagery of the World… There is worse attendance.
Yaze sublimated his rough apprenticeship of street art. He controls his impulses by channeling them on his immense white pages that are his frames. But art is born out of constraint, as André Gide assured it. And in the constraints that he imposes on himself, Yaze lets his personal fury vibrate. It is she who matters to us. What does it reveal? What is she hiding? What does it tell us? Of him, of the world in which we live? The painter does not need words to convince us of his passion for the world. To suggest to us what he feels, what he suffers, what he likes. At the age of 26, through his painting, which is his weapon of defense and his language, Yaze imposes his truth on us. It is overwhelming. "
Jacques Bouzerand, October 2006