Kan/Dmv

From a village in the south to the suburbs of Paris

Kan was born in 1977 and grew up in a small village in the south of France. By his own account his entry into graffiti came through boredom: trapped in a high school classroom, he was busier sketching in his school books and carving his name into the desks than listening to his teachers, and he began painting anonymously at night, hunting the best spots in his home town. A first trip to Paris and then one to Los Angeles pushed him further in. He studied science, trained as a graphic designer, and moved to Paris to work as a motion designer.

There he spent a long time in the company of the writer Bom.k, and through him joined Da Mental Vaporz, the crew universally known as DMV, whose members include Blo, Brusk, Gris1, Iso, Jaw, Lek and Sowat. Together they produced large murals across the southern suburbs of Paris, and the crew became one of the most recognisable formations in French graffiti. The double life of the period matters to the work: a day spent in motion design and a night spent on a wall left him thinking about images as grids of points rather than as strokes.

Street pointillism

As a child Kan drew pixel by pixel on an Amstrad home computer, and he has said plainly that this is where he fell in love with pixels. That fascination runs straight through the mature work. He has distorted his own name in a thousand directions, from throw ups to digitalised block letters, from pixel art to halftone graffiti and dripping QR codes, and eventually arrived at the method he calls street pointillism.

The procedure is simple to describe and punishing to execute. Thousands of individual dots are laid down by hand, in ink or marker, with no continuous line anywhere on the surface. Up close the canvas is an even field of marks. At a distance the dots snap together and a portrait stares back. He sometimes titles a picture by the number of dots it took, which turns the work into a record of its own labour. His subjects have ranged from the popular uprisings that he became obsessed with while they were happening, to pinups, to portraits of figures from music and art. He works under the handle street pointillist, and the technique has carried him well past the graffiti audience.

Walls, museums and galleries

Kan has painted at jams and festivals and shown steadily in galleries from Paris to London and New York. In 2013 he took part in Tour Paris 13, the tower block filled with murals by Galerie Itinerrance before its demolition. In 2014 he was in the Lasco Project in the underbelly of the Palais de Tokyo and in Djerbahood, the village of murals on the Tunisian island of Djerba. In 2015 he was included in Main Street at the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat, and in 2016 in a survey of urban and street art at Galerie Laurent Strouk in Paris.

In 2018 DMV took a residency at the Beit Hair Museum in Tel Aviv for Alone in the Dark. In 2021 his work appeared in Hip Hop 360 at the Philharmonie de Paris. A retrospective at the SpaceJunk art centre in Grenoble followed in 2025, and in 2026 he showed at the Petit Palais with Galerie Itinerrance. He has also worked in film alongside Lek and Sowat on documentaries about painting in abandoned places.

The work at auction

Three kinds of object carry his name, and only two of them trade. The murals are fixed to their walls and survive as photographs. The unique canvases, built dot by dot in ink or marker over many hours, are what reach the saleroom, and Artcurial in Paris sold one of these ink on canvas pictures for a mid four figure sum including premium in 2015. The third category is the signed and numbered print, issued by print studios in runs as small as fifty and priced far below a painted canvas.

A buyer should establish which of the two tradeable categories is on offer before reading anything into a price. Kan signs and dates his canvases on the reverse rather than on the face, so photographs of the back of the stretcher are as useful as photographs of the image, and the surface itself should show genuine hand laid dot work rather than a reproduction of it.