cedric leonard

For as long as I can remember, I always drew and I have never stopped drawing- an inexplicable need that I try to enhance every day. As the youngest one of a family of 8 children of African descent, I had to speak up very early in order to fit in and learn to exist. I think that this fundamental necessity has allowed me to reveal my artistic side. I want my works to convey a message and to stand out- further than what I can achieve for myself. I also want them to be noticed, to be able to shock, to move or to inspire. I need them to be what I wish I was in my everyday life. These works of art represent my inner self and they are my most faithful embodiment. They symbolize another version of me. They complete and sublimate me. They are rooted in my life experience and I live through each one as an actual catharsis. However, if they are related to my life, I appreciate my audience to project their own experience. I indeed intend to rock the spectators in order to get them out their usual framework and to wake them up to a multi-faceted reality that is obviously biased but strong and powerful.   In my view, art enables to internally get away and to make people around us enjoy our inner landscapes. An artist sees and depicts the world in a different way through their eyes. Nothing is beautiful but nothing is ugly. And anything can be either one or the other. This is what I call artistic relativity. The disability I have on my left hand has contributed a lot to my creativity. Since I was a little kid, I have had to grasp life differently and develop a whole set of new strategies in order to live as anyone else. Today, my art is still marked by this subterfuge process. Not everything is conspicuous. It has to be discovered step by step. I’ve always felt as someone who is trying to belong to a senseless world.My artistic approach is rooted in the willingness to accept oneself and to come up freely with this identity in a world that does not let us be what we want to be. I feel like my art provides me with assertiveness and establish myself in any environment; it also testifies thisdeeply rooted feeling that I’m unique. In my opinion, art is the evidence that beauty lies anywhere and in all of us. I’m obsessed with life, drawing, creativity and creation. The technique of collage enables me to reinvent life and to give it a new dimension beyond codes and conventions. And this process is endless. Shapes no longer matter ; possibilities are infinite. Techniques: collage, painting, digital practices, drawing and photography. I use digitally redesigned images that I print on different materials (wood, aluminium, canvas) on which I put other elements such as papers, photographs or painting. Because of their particularities, those different techniques enable me to express my art and manage to create visual and mental patterns. This work carried out through layers reveals a multiple-level reality.
InspirationSeveral artists have inspired me either through the way they reuse pre-existing materials or their references to some subjects close to my heart.Pablo Picasso for his love of African art and his mastery of cubism which makes up and breaks up any subject through the method of assembling linear and geometric shapesJacques Villeglé for his displaying art and the second breath he gives to scraps of paper doomed to disappear.
Jérôme Bosch, James Ensor et René Magritte who managed to reunite the human being and the animal in some enchanting and fantastic worlds in order to take the spectator on an unaccustomed and bewildering journey.  Martial Raysse for his powerful portraits that highlight the human being through the magic of colours.Edvard Munch for his genius of the despair and the power of his emotions.Jean-Paul Goude for his fascination for the black woman, his absolute sense of advertising and the subversive misappropriation of his works.Mr. Brainwash for the “pop” craziness I relate to.