About SokanRed
Before becoming SokanRed, there was silence.The silence of a child for whom drawing was as natural as breathing, but whose dreams were stifled by the demands of adult life.
For a time, drawing became a distant memory. Amid the noise of the world, the inner voice grew faint, buried beneath the pressures of daily life.
Yet the fire still smoldered.
Silent, latent.
Waiting for its moment.
In 1998, the silence burst into light. Under the kind guidance of Xavier Lafaysse, SokanRed discovered color — not merely as a tool — but as a living language. Each hue became a breath, each gesture, an echo of the soul.
He seeks neither to please nor to imitate. He seeks to reclaim the forgotten breath. “I do not pretend to be an artist. I observe, I study, I paint.” His approach is neither academic nor systematic. It is intuitive, visceral.
“A painting? It cannot be explained, it evokes an emotion.”
— Zao Wou-Ki
Without art school or a conventional path, SokanRed moves forward as a self-taught artist. Book after book, canvas after canvas, he builds his own visual vocabulary, shaped by accidents, trial and error, and sudden epiphanies.
He describes himself as a “zhèngtu wài yìshùjiā” — (an artist outside the mainstream). A craftsman of raw emotion, who values the sincerity of the gesture over learned virtuosity.
“The painter must not only paint what he sees before him,
but also what he sees within himself.”
— Caspar David Friedrich
SokanRed’s painting is a tender battle between matter and spirit. The brush strikes, caresses, lacerates. Colors clash and reconcile. Each canvas bears the imprint of movement, of breath, of the body.
His works vibrate with a constant tension: between the volcanic force of red and the aquatic softness of blue, between the violence of the gesture and the delicacy of silence. Between strength and tenderness. Each canvas is a breath, a pulse of contained energy. The material vibrates beneath the hand.
Symbolic Portrait
If SokanRed were to be described in something other than words, he would be:
- A phoenix, endlessly reborn from its ashes
- A red flame, dancing across the canvas
- A silent library, filled with whispered dreams
- A red rose, radiant and fragile
- A staircase, leading to invisible worlds
For SokanRed, painting is neither a profession nor even a vocation in the classical sense. Painting is a way of being in the world — a humble yet ardent attempt to capture the invisible, to translate the unspeakable.
Through his canvases, he invites us to slow down, to feel, to reconnect with what is essential — that which we do not always see, but can sense.
“A painting only lives through the one who looks at it.”
— Pablo Picasso
Today, SokanRed paints as naturally as he breathes. What he cannot express with words, he entrusts to color. Each work becomes a breath of the soul passed on to the observer.
