His first experience of Las Vegas dates back to 2012, when he went on a “graphic road trip” from San Francisco to New York. In April 2022, Yann Kebbi went back for a week, rising to the challenge of testing his mettle in the face of the city. “As soon as I arrived, I knew why I had come back.” He was immediately drawn by the stream of people thronging the Strip with no clear purpose. As extremes rub up against each other in this never-ending movement, Las Vegas acts “like a play presented in the round with the actors in the middle and the audience hovering around them,” says the artist. The production work begins when Kebbi returns to his studio in Paris: his pencil scratches, furrows and sculpts the paper. Waves of customers, colorful arabesques, looks on the verge of tears… “Drawing is always the theme of my work. Here, Las Vegas offered the frame. My objective was to find the appropriate visual and graphic solutions to address the subject.” Born in 1987, Yann Kebbi spent his childhood in Paris.
Graduate from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, he has always considered drawing as a second nature and he is constantly capturing the essence of what he observes in spontaneous and rapid sketches. The fundamentals of Kebbi’s approach have emerged from this tireless practice, dictated by the speed of execution — skittish strokes, truncated lines, transparency effects, layering of spaces and planes — along with his predilection for dry media, and pencils in particular.