Deuz

Born in Marseille in 1979, Deuz came to graffiti and comics early and started painting in the city's streets in the mid-1990s. A visit to the Picasso Museum at seventeen settled his vocation: he went on to a design diploma, a degree in fine arts and a master's in applied arts, and has taught art since 2004. His style is resolutely figurative: working in pencil, ballpoint, watercolour, spray paint and Posca markers, he produces portraits he nicknames his "tronches", most often African faces steeped in hip-hop culture. Portraiture speaks to people directly, he says, and music shapes both his process and the titles of his pieces.