About adesane
Alexandre Desane is a self-taught contemporary artist of Haitian origin, born in France. He lives and works in Paris.
His first contact with art was with hiphop dance, breaking, which he practiced for some fifteen years, before stopping for good with covid in 2020. From his years of dancing, he made a short film BEATBOXE in 2012, which was screened at the Cinémathèque Française.
An actor in independent films, he took part as a secondary role in Philippe Lacôte’s film RUN, which was selected at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, in the Un Certain Regard section. He plays the lead role of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat in the short film To Repel Ghosts directed by Philippe Lacôte, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. In HEIS, the crossmedia project created by Anaïs Volpé, which brings together a feature film, a series and an art installation, he plays the role of the high-level athlete and assists the camera in the feature film HEIS (chronicles), which won Best Foreign Film at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2016. He also assists Anaïs Volpé in directing the art installation HEIS (on the wall). He plays a supporting role in Anaïs Volpé’s feature film “Entre les Vagues / The Braves”, premiering at the Cannes 2021 Directors’ Fortnight. In 2022, he played the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon in a feature film directed by Abdenour Zahzah, recounting the psychiatrist’s Algerian period, which had its world premiere at the Berlinale 2024.
He has been a photographer since 2010, and has developed a strong preference for film photography. One of his photos was selected by Martin Parr and exhibited in large format in the Paris Metro in 2018. He created and self-published his first photo book, « Crépus », in 2020, which, like a street photography book, celebrates the beauty of Afro hairstyles on the streets of Paris in black and white.
He directed his first short film “The Orange Child” in 2020, which deals with racism from a child’s point of view, following the journey of Wilnor, a video game enthusiast who dreams of being an actor. “Dans la jungle avec un petit couteau à beurre…” (In the jungle with a little butter knife…) is a webseries documentary he is co-directing with Anaïs Volpé, about the journey of self-taught artists in French society.
Throughout his adolescence, drawing was an important part of his life, something he never fully assumed, until 2023, shortly after the birth of his daughters, when he decided to go professional, choosing the bright colors of the oil pastel medium to express his colorful vision of the world, and exhibiting for the first time at the Expo4art art fair in Paris in September 2024.
Watch my process videos: @adesanecanpaint