AFAT French, b. 1993

Born in 1993 in Toulouse, Maxime Perboire, known as AFAT, lives and works in his hometown.
Drawing has accompanied his childhood like an intimate language. At just four years old, he made a portrait of his father on a simple piece of paper — a drawing that has been kept ever since and has become the point of origin of his universe.

After several years of exploration, alternating between studio work and graffiti practice, he found in spray paint a tool of freedom and energy. In 2023, he felt a need for purity and simplicity. The drawing from his childhood resurfaced, becoming the starting point of a new artistic quest. “Each piece is born from the need to simplify, to distill what’s essential.”

AFAT now paints with aerosol on raw linen canvases — characters traced in a single breath. His style, deliberately naïve, reconnects with the primal act of drawing. His line is vibrant, marked by a speckled spray technique he developed himself: “I learned how to make my own caps thanks to artists from South America. It took time to find the right pressure, the right temperature, the right flow.”

His figures — “neither men nor women, nor children” — float between shadow and softness. Fragile, light, always barefoot, they embody “that fragment of childhood we still carry within us.” Alone or in groups, they express emotions more than stories. Painting, drawing, sculpture — his vocabulary is built around the line, whether traced, engraved, or shaped. In 2024, AFAT began working with bronze sculpture, in close collaboration with the Ilhat foundry in Toulouse.

“Working with bronze is like accepting a kind of slowness, a ritual. Once the plaster sculpture is finished, it has to be molded, cast, waited for, patinated. Nothing happens instantly.” Through sculpture, he quite literally gives body to his silhouettes: the line becomes volume, the drawing takes life. There is something almost magical in this passage — from drawing to matter, from gesture to presence.

Today, AFAT continues to pursue a body of work that is both intimate and universal, freed from any form of demonstration.