Ken Sortais's work involves making molds, resulting in seemingly ready to explode blown up sculptures with gory features. In fact, his motto is ‘J'aurai ta peau', literally translating to ‘I shall have your skin'. His produces his own ‘Sculpt'air' (inflatable sculptures), made out of milky, thin, elastic, and resistant liquid latex. Ken Sortais applies it in a multilayered manner, sometimes mixing it with color pigments, all around his subjects, fully covering them. Once the molds dry up, he removes them, turns them out and fills them with air, overblowing them and changing their features. Air is essential in this process, as it works as an invisible sculptor, getting right into all the tiny nooks and crannies of the membrane and transforming any hollow areas into protuberances.
Between 2014 and 2022, Ken Sortais undertook a hunt in the public urban space, his prey being sculptures of religious and mythological figures, serving as models for his 1:1 latex impression of them. These samplings without authorization constitute offenses, so, in continuation with his graffiti experiences, Ken usually acted at night, drawing up plans to avoid getting caught, sometimes even disguising himself. When arriving in Marseille in 2022, Ken Sortais shifted his practice from night to day, and also changed the nature of his models. It is now in his studio that he takes the time to experiment with scrap unearthed from car scrap yards. This change in modus operandi allows him to work his molds with greater precision, composing statuary totem-like silhouettes, derived from pieces of motorbikes and car carcasses, and still dirty from their oil and grease.
His career mostly developed in France, where he exhibited in recognized institutions like Palais de Tokyo, but lately he also began moving outwards, exposing his works in Spain, UK, Italy, Belgium, and Taiwan. In the last two years, since he began being represented by Galería Alegría, he had a solo exposition in the gallery space, and also started to participate in international art fairs.
Ken Sortais (Saint-Denis, France, 1983) graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Rouen (Rouen, France) in 2006, and from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (Paris, France) in 2010. He currently lives and works in Marseille (France).