“Art is not a thing; it is a way.” ~Elbert Hubbard
Antoine de Pins (aka ADN Paris) is a painter who lives and works between France and Mexico.
In 2018, after working for several years in the telecommunications sector in East Africa, he decided to dedicate himself fully to painting. His approach focuses on exploring materials, developing experimental techniques in search of a personal way of expression through abstract creations.
His technique, based on counterintuitive gestures such as crumpling wet canvases or cutting blocks of paper, is a constant oscillation between destruction and reconstruction. This dichotomy lends his works a raw, almost chaotic character (looking for a cosmic beauty).
We met him in Paris a few weeks ago on the occasion of his exhibition ADN loves ART and we talked about life, changes and, of course, art.
Hi Antoine!
What’s art in 2025?
I often say art is a serious thing and yet one shouldn’t take art too seriously, life goes on… But by definition art is a way for us humans to transcend our nature and condition, it’s no diferent in 2025. Of course we live in crazy times, information and stimuli are all over the place and its quite overwhelming for most of us frankly. Art can be seen as a collective safety net, possibly a way to redeem ourselves in light of where our societies are heading to. Again it sounds very cliché hence the idea for me to personnaly balance the importance of art and its triviality at the same time.
Could you share specific moments from your childhood that deeply influenced the themes in your work? How did your environment contribute to the development of your artistic process to better reflect your identity?
I always was the kid who drew well within friends and family. My parents put me at a young age in painting classes where I learnt most traditional mediums. I wasnt exposed to modern nor contemporary art at all until age 9 or 10 when I visited an uncle whose flat was filled with abstract paintings. I was a bit shocked and confidently asserted I could do better. He commissioned me for a piece and I made a kind of colourfield painting style gouache with big blocks of colours and some kind of figures blending in (still couldnt resolve to do a 100% abstract piece!). I was “remunerated ” with a book on the painter Robert Combas and from then on became fascinated with what forms and directions painting could take.
Your work focuses on exploring materials, developing experimental techniques in search of a personal means of expression through abstract creations.
What is your creative process like, and how do these materials and techniques enhance the themes and messages you wish to convey?
I never start with a plan or a theme in mind.
I work fast, paint the canvas unstretched on the floor, stretch it rework it again, turn the piece upside down a million times! The goal is to stay open and “opportunistic” long enough for something I didn’t expect to appear. At first it is about being spontaneous and almost ignorant, but as a painting advance there is inevitably more thinking, conscious decisions and editing so that the work actually fits within my personal artistic canon, something hard to define but that I am confortable to put my name on it.
You “create” your art between France and Mexico.
How can art serve as a bridge between cultures and foster understanding and empathy?
I don’t feel people need a lecture about understanding each other, especially from someone who has the privilege to stay in a studio all day making marks on a canvas. I just want a viewer from anywhere to stand in front of a work and feels that it is foreign and familiar to them at the same time. Thats the beauty of art and painting in in my case, it is immediate and universal, and can create a bridge between people with very diferent life experiences.
ADN loves ART is the latest exhibition you showed in Paris.
What did you want to convey?
What’s the message behind the exhibition?
It is in our nature to try and recognize objects and familiar elements within our surrounding in order to feel at ease, understand what our eyes are seeing, or even survive! It is more or less the idea of pattern recognition and “paraeidolia”. I further pushed this idea in these new paintings that have a drawing or “studies” quality to them, reinforced by the use of black lines like an initial sketch on the large paintings, and an economy of means on the smaller ones. My work is resolutely abstract but I do find confort when a purely abstract composition imposes an interpretation, a vague idea of a time and place, a feeling, a landscape or a person. If any the deeper message about this serie of work is the idea that a piece of art needs not to be overworked, simplicity and spontaneity have an inherent subtle attractiveness.
A letter to your future self.
A letter to my former self would probably be more usefull!
But in brief:
Dear Future Me, have you painted it all yet? If by miracle you think “this is it, I’ve arrived”, please start again. Keep the curse alive!
