Élysée Pontal is a contemporary artist investigating what remains when inheritance disappears: memories we cannot fully access, origins we cannot recover, structures that keep shaping us long after their source is forgotten.

 

Born in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, in 1991 to an Ivorian mother and a French father, he arrived in France in 1998. His formation already held the tension his practice would later make explicit: Applied Arts at La Martinière-Diderot in Lyon, oriented toward design, then fine art at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Saint-Étienne. His own body carries the same coexistence of contrasts that runs through his work: Ivorian and French, colonized and colonizer, Black and white, shaped by animist tradition as much as by a monotheistic worldview.

 

I am not a fraction of either. I am fully both, simultaneously, and fully what emerges from their encounter.

 

For fifteen years, that tension found its first outlet in fashion design, 3D creation and teaching, where Pontal built an international practice and became a leading voice in digital fashion and 3D education across some of the world's foremost design schools, sharpening the tools of monumental scale, algorithmic image making and digital fabrication that now shape his artistic practice.

 

The absence of his own lineage became the origin of this shift. Working primarily across 3D image, digital animation and monumental scale printing, Pontal builds worlds that advance frame by frame with the full and new moon, each taking close to fourteen and a half years to unfold in full. His practice now extends into painting and sculpture built from his own hair, thirteen years cut and kept: a literal archive of the body, reclaimed as material.

 

What we inherit shapes us. What we create reveals what remains.