Of Franco-Togolese origin, Leo Kpodzro was born in La Garenne-Colombes (92). He has lived in Saint-Ouen since childhood. From a young age, Leo demonstrated a talent for painting. He graduated from IFM in 2022. His approach primarily revolves around the development of a contemporary pictorial language, combined with anachronistic and cross-civilizational elements, with the idea of creating bridges between already established artistic currents.

Leo Kpodzro's work is distinguished by studies of bodies that mix portraits and morphological sketches. He initiates an academic pictorial practice through the use of oil paint, coupled with a demanding and unique vision. His canvases, marked by almost intuitive brushstrokes from which reliefs systematically emerge, reveal his preference for a raw vision of painting. According to the artist, the vibrancy of his works lies in the imprecision of his gestures, and the subtleties of his art are revealed in the strength of his execution. His often sharp, realistic view of contemporary society leads to a profound questioning of the system.

 

 Although perfectly in tune with the history of classical and expressionist painting, Leo Kpodzro has managed

to free himself from a tyrannical and complacent subjectivity. The artist draws on an almost immediate perception of his environment, coupled with a certain knowledge of how to act upon it, in order to transform and detemporalize it an antidote to ephemerality. The protagonists conceived by the artist are distinguished by the heterogeneity of their physical appearance, a fundamental element of his art, as he seeks to particularize them to reveal their eccentricity and androgyny. Leo Kpodzro takes the approach of amplifying and disproportionating certain morphological characteristics, which turn out to be a major element of his work as they implicitly introduce a certain permeability between the real world and his imagination.