Kévin Bray - Introduction 2025

Kévin Bray Introduction

KÉVIN BRAY

Kévin Bray (Corbie, FR 1989) is a French interdisciplinary artist currently based in Amsterdam. Initially trained as a graphic designer with two MA degrees obtained in both France and the Netherlands, Bray soon after became an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (2018-2019).

There he cultivated his practice as an independent visual artist within the contemporary art arena. Moving with ease across the boundaries of various disciplines, through his work he tries to understand how the form and language of particular software and various mediums are visualized and how they can be potentially manipulated into other ways of functioning.

His vivid images are the product of a methodology defined by a hybridity of techniques, motifs and visual codes in which he plays, stretches and confronts various new technologies and tools to shape a stimulating artistic language. Influenced by his graphic design background and fascinated by the history of painting, ideas of composition and communication are ever present in the construction of his work. By engaging with a diversity of communication strategies ranging from video, painting, animation, to sculpture, music and writing, Bray observes and learns their many functions. His desire to blend these ways of creation allow him to bridge techniques across the physical and digital realms in unexpected ways, creating new captivating realities and perspectives that reflect the evolution that our stories are taking.

“ In my work I try to be a generalist of technologies, tools, and media. I believe that they are a language or at least an extension of it. I try to observe and learn from as many tools deriving from a diversity of systems, ranging from paintings, sculpting, writing, 3D modeling, filming, animating, composing, drawing methodologies and design to storytelling music making and sound design. Of course, I don’t master any of them but I try to understand and bridge all of those forms of language in unexpected ways, in order to encompass new realities and new perspectives on the shapes our narratives (social and political beliefs) are taking. What is important is the story to tell as much as the way to tell it. Surface and content, the surface is content. Medium and formats, information and mediation ”.

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us –Marshall McLuhan

They are echoes of expression, 2025 Print on plexiglass, PLA, wood, metal and ceramic

145 x 100 x 25 cm

This art piece is the inaugural entry in a series of research that explores and employs various visual strategies designed to resist the interpretive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), by challenging the AI’s ability to comprehend and categorize images, seeking to redefine what it means to create outside the framework imposed by AI. This resistance is not only an act of defiance but a pedagogical exercise that might question the boundaries of AI interpretation and, by extension, our own expressive limitations. Some methods used in this piece are: merging figures that challenge AI’s ability to segment and categorize distinct entities, incremental symbolism that requires contextual and sequential understanding, challenging materiality that defies straightforward material categorization and unconventional perspectives that create a visual language that is deliberately complex and ambiguous.

They are seasons of being, 2 025 Print on plexiglass, PLA, metal, wood, terrazzo, glass and arti ficial flowers

PROTOVISE: SHAPING IDS, SWAPPING WORLDS AT STEDELIJK MUSEUM AMSTERDAM

Bray has a fascination for the ways in which objects influence our ability to create and understand. He is interested in the embodied cognition theory of philosopher Andy Clark, who proposes that objects and tools can be integrated into our cognitive processes, enabling us to transform, reinforce or bias our thinking, perceiving, and acting capacities.

These ideas can be seen in his installation ProtoVise: Shaping IDs, Swapping Worlds. The work consists of an animation in which two figures play catch, while each time the object they are playing with disappears and reappears in a different form, emerging from the body of one of the figures. The animated figures are projected onto two 3D-printed sculptures, tracing the different steps of the animation of the two figures.

ProtoVise: Shaping IDs, Swapping Worlds, 2024

Video, color, sound, 3 min.,3D printed sculptures in PLA filament - Installed at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam during exhibition Circulate

Sculpture 1: 225 x 168 x 227 cm

Sculpture 2: 202 x 132 x 199 cm

ProtoVise: Shaping IDs, Swapping Worlds, 2024

Video, color, sound, 3 min.,3D printed sculptures in PLA filament - Installed at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam during exhibition Circulate

Sculpture 1: 225 x 168 x 227 cm

Sculpture 2: 202 x 132 x 199 cm

BULLBEAR DYNAMICS

HYPERCREATURES - MYTHOLOGIEN DER ZUKUNFT AT MAX ERNST MUSEUM

The installation “BullBear Dynamics” explores the tension between being and becoming, questioning the dominant narrative of infinite growth in a finite world. At its center is a character inspired by Janus, the Roman god of transitions and duality, depicted with two faces—one looking to the future and the other to the past. In this version, Janus looks in one direction with the face of a bull, symbolizing ambition and growth, and in another direction with the face of a bear, embodying caution and decline. These dual faces reflect the opposing forces of bull and bear markets, as well as the broader tension between progress and restraint.

The character climbs a ladder that transforms into a DNA structure and then into an ever-evolving line graph, resembling both stock market charts and the shapes of stories as described by Kurt Vonnegut. The DNA structure highlights the biological traits that drive human hunger for survival and expansion. Yet, it also serves as a prison, weaponized in narratives that justify human extraction and exploitation as biological determinism. “BullBear Dynamics” critiques the pervasive focus on growth-oriented narratives, asking why stories of success are almost always framed as ascents and rarely as successful degrowth. The work advocates for a more nuanced view of human nature and questions whether endless growth and expansion are inevitable and if they truly serve us in a finite world.

Kévin Bray

it is left (2023) + it was right (2023)

steel pole, wooden board, carpet, 3D printed PLA, acrylic paint

Individual sculpture: 108 x 160 cm

Installation price (including projections): €24,000

Installation price (projections excluded): €19,000

Singular sculpture (including projections): €12,000

Singular sculpture (projections excluded): €9,500

THE COLLECTIVE SHADOW

The solo exhibition The Collective Shadow showcased sculptures, paintings and video projections, all of which were composed to interact mutually and which formed the intricate fabric of a multi-media installation. This interrelation of mediums, narrative techniques and tools is important in depicting and directing the experience of the works themselves and reflects essential strategies of Bray’s artistic practice.

In The Collective Shadow, Bray’s works and installations guide us through an exploration of a universal entity and a historic figure: the Monster. The concept of the Monster has been introduced to all of us, one way or another. Yet, only by looking at the etymology of the word monstrosity do we begin to understand the potentially complex roles that monsters play within society. Monster derives from the Latin, monstrare, meaning “to demonstrate”, and monere, “to warn.” Thus, in essence, monsters are demonstrative. They reveal, show and make evident —often uncomfortably— the cultural or psychological characteristics that we as a society find difficult to acknowledge.

Bray’s work is distinguished through multimedia approaches, particularly the technique of projection/video mapping. In which a projector is used to cast light on arbitrarily structured surfaces in a tailored way, seamlessly layering the projection like a new skin to interact mutually on top of our physical reality. Reverberating this methodology and play between obscurity and projection, with The Collective Shadow Bray expands on this interrelation of light and darkness as a metaphor to consider our larger collective challenges.

Throughout the past decade we have had a resurgence of monsters. They seem to act as an important social tool, able to embody abstract contemporary and often collective fears, dangers and anxieties. These monsters in some cases exemplify Carl Jung’s collective shadow. In Jung’s analytical psychology, the

collective shadow is defined as what has been hidden inside of ourselves collectively because it is repressed, denied or unintegrated. Within his practice, Bray adopts the climate crisis and fossil fuel energy consumption as examples of this expanding shadow. The complexity of relations and our dependency to production processes with high polluting emissions explain our in-action towards climate changes. Such a massive problem eludes us in our shortsightedness and doesn’t seem to fit our political and social agenda, which is drastically shaped by a global neoliberal way of seeing the world.

In the first room of The Collective Shadow, blinded by the symbolic spotlights of our spectacledriven society, two characters converse unintelligibly. In the background, their shadows hectically grow and experiment within the limits of their elemental powers and tools. The evergrowing complexity of this world’s dynamics provokes unbounded natural reactions that are ever more primitive and elemental. And through these catastrophic acts, we come to see that our contemporary monsters are the ones we have already been introduced to during childhood— Water, Fire, Wind and Earth— the elements that create life, are today’s increasing dangers.

MORPHER

A large part of Bray’s practice revolves around the creation of paintings and the continual evolution of his video Morpher (2018 – ongoing). Navigating through bright shape shifting landscapes, this video work acts as the spineand living archive of Bray’s artistic practice. Like a living organism, Morpher it is continuously evolving, and the many characters seen across his paintings become props in an extending reality where they can be activated differently. Interacting with the backdrop and stage, his otherworldly images are always at the edge of transparency and concealment. He is renowned for showing the viewer precisely how the work is constructed, and what is essential to him is the story to tell as much as the way to tell it. By doing so, he invites us to reflect on the transformation of production processes and the alteration of their narratives, revealing their ability to force us to question our relation to materiality and reality.

Like a living organism, Morpher is continuously evolving, and the many characters seen across his paintings become props in an extending reality where they can be activated differently. The paintings on the aforementioned opposite wall, are autonomous pieces as much as symbolic storyboards for the video Morpher . The paintings recurrently make an appearance within the video series, existing within the pre-production space as announcers of what may come, as much as props later within the video as reminders of these interconnected complementary processes.

Morpher (2018-ongoing)

Video: 11m04scds

Still from Morpher (2018-ongoing)

Still from Morpher (2018-ongoing)

eCar-us (2023)

Full Installation

NN AWARD INSTALLATION

3D modeling image references are a set of images that help artists to have a deeper understanding of the object they are modeling in a 3D software. These images are often the front back, right, left, up and down representation of the object they are digitalizing. For this NN award installation, a painting has been captured in these 6 different angles as a way to display, comment and bring together the making of the object and the object itself. It is a simple gesture of distanciation towards a still image built primarily in volume, but also a strategy to hide and reveal parts of the narrative which is usually left in the shadows.

Group show Mixed Feelings at

from July–August 2023.

Death Jam and Living Juice is the title of Kevin Bray’s recent solo exhibition at Spiaggia Libera, a contemporary art gallery in Paris, that was only established since 2024. As the combination of death, yet living juice, signifies, is Bray’s interest in the notion of zombification for this exhibition. Specifically how this seems to permeate a multiplicity of strategies shaping authority, a power that tends to reject our will.

Crude oil, a once-living dark liquid, is extracted from its natural graveyard only to be enslaved. The digitization of our professions and algorithms scrutinize our behaviours to reshape them, and by feeding on our internal vulnerabilities they create addictions and polarizations.

Through his artworks, Bray immerses us in the corrosive and eroding nature of triumphant thought patterns that govern our worlds and societies, exploring the various forms of exploitation, whether they occur on living or dead bodies, and transmutes the gallery space while doing so.

DEATH JAM AND LIVING JUICE

Details of show Breakdown After Before at Dordrecht Museum in Dordrecht, The Netherlands (2021).

It is leaking (2020) Digital print and acrylic on canvas