Never lift the pencil, draw in a single stroke. If the exercise seems tendentious and current, as it floods the sector of decoration, clothing or tattoo, it draws its origins from the beginning of the last century.

Pablo Picasso is one of the artists who gave drawing its letters of nobility. He never stopped drawing. The Woman and the Dove is one of his most representative works that can be found today printed on cushions or ceramics. Fascinated by the line, the very essence of each artistic production, Matisse and Jean Cocteau followed the movement. The craze is reviving today and some artists are even making “one line drawing” or “face line art” their trademark.

This is the case of the Dutch artist Niels Kiené Salventius, who creates his works by instinct and without draft. Some say that his art resembles that of Picasso.

For him, the “one line” allows him to stay focused. « I don’t know where it starts, where it ends, but what’s in between is pure adventure! A bit like life, ” he confides about his technique. The constraint, for him, does not lie in the fact that he never raises his wrist but in the fact that he manages to make something out of the empty space, which he sometimes fills with colors in an abstract way. But the most important choice is ” deciding where the line will cross, turn or go back,” he explains. The result of a well-thought-out calculation and far from being a trivial practice, the continuous line continues its rise, which began a hundred years ago.

Discover the world of Niel Kiené Salventius on Instagram @salventius

By Cheynnes Tlili