Born in 1969, Mambo is a French artist living in Provence.

Since the start of his career in the mid-80s, Mambo’s work has linked modern, contemporary, minimalist and graffiti art to create a praxis and style all his own. His works range from semi-abstract graphic games of spontaneous lines and drawings to abstract action painting and his characteristic red-orange portraits.

Mambo’s artistic career revolves around four main series: Strokes, Brainology, Mindscapes and Humans.

Able to choose the style or discipline needed to express his feelings in the moment, his works display an expressive graphic universe full of underlying meanings, combining observation, ambiguity and humor. But humanity remains the central theme of each of Mambo’s works, inspired by the brain and its mental processes, sensations, emotions, memories, inner feelings and mechanical reactions. Human behaviors become colorful ideograms, our environment becomes a dictionary from which Mambo draws symbols to write his own prose: visual riddles, combining intuition and mastery.

Brainology

Mambo describes Brainology as a mapping of the brain, emotional snapshots of our cranium.

The network of thick lines thus created opens up a series of windows
Mambo uses a fine brush to draw patterns and designs automatically and intuitively – the wise stage.

Mindscapes

This series, begun in Los Angeles in 2019, is an outgrowth of 2015’s Brainology series, which are contourless, highly colorful and abstract, reborn here in a very pared-down, dream-centric version.

Humans

Through his work on Portraits, Mambo explores the Human and the emotions that appear in faces and attitudes. His powerful graphic language, combining observation, ambiguity and second degree, reveals what is happening inside the Self. Lines flirt with caricature, sharp colors give rise to deep emotions, symbols – hat, necklace, suit, black dress, etc. – meets puzzling clues in order to multiply the possibilities and interpretations. This minimalist pop aesthetic unveils the human comedy through a question-and-answer game between the artwork and the viewer. Mambo always leaves a certain enigma, in which the spectator becomes an actor, subject and object at the same time, question and answer.