Small Studio

Vincent Jacquin, who works under the name of Small Studio, has been established as a freelance artist since 2007. Trained as a graphic designer, Vincent’s practice covers various fields from printmaking to mural painting, graphic design and illustration. He has a strong attachment to printmaking, but also develops a lot of mural projects, aiming to create bridges between these two practices.

Vincent is also part of the Superseñor Workshop, a micro-publishing workshop located in a small town in France that gathers approximately fifteen artists and designers around silkscreen and risograph printing.

Through Small Studio Vincent works on commissioned graphic design work, creating logos, visual identities, and posters. With his mural paintings he operates with a much more free and artistic approach, creating works for clients including public authorities and private companies. Vincent also self-publishes and creates abstract graphic research work with a focus on the combination of shapes and colours.

Vincent graduated in Graphic Arts in the early 2000s, and went on to partake in multiple internships to train himself to the professional world. His first real work experience was at a printing company. He tells us; “At that time, I was dreaming about big communication agencies and this job in a printing shop was just for food in my eyes. But it was thanks to this experience that I was able to acquire solid knowledge in the field of printing. I developed a real interest in these techniques, which I haven’t abandoned since.”

He then landed a job at a communication agency where he became an Art Director. “After a couple of years, a certain routine started to set in. I didn’t really feel fulfilled in this job anymore, especially on a creative level,” says the designer. The opportunity to work as a freelance graphic designer then came to Vincent, and he has now been practicing for over 15 years. 

Vincent’s first missions were design works for communication agencies. He gradually developed a network of clients with whom he worked directly, which allowed him to detach from working for agencies. For several years, he had been considering his practice with a more artistic approach, notably through self-publishing (silkscreening and risographs) and mural painting. Today, printed artworks or murals represent the major part of his activity, and he is “very happy” to have succeeded in making these two passions his daily job.

Each of Vincent’s projects starts systematically by hand, on paper, in a notebook. He has been accumulating for several years a large quantity of sketchbooks that contain the traces and starting points of all the projects he has worked on, and hopes to one day create an exhibition or edition from them. He also likes to go back to old projects, partly for nostalgia but also to find forgotten ideas and sometimes reuse them when it’s relevant. Vincent aims to draw daily in a free way, without constraint of result or precise objective. He tests combinations of colours, shapes, and collages, which he describes as “a bank of graphic experimentation that I then reinvest in certain projects”.

However, one thing that is central to Vincent’s work is the way he approaches form and colour. Vincent’s academic and professional training is closely linked to printing techniques, and most of the projects he develops, whether in a commissioned or free research context, question these techniques. More specifically, the overprinting of colours and the creative possibilities it allows to develop. Even in his mural work, Vincent approaches the colour under this angle and tries to reproduce in painting combinations which are revealed in serigraphy or Risograph. Currently, he is experimenting with transparent paints, or with low covering power, in order to work with this medium in a similar way.

For a long time, Vincent was very inspired by the “monsters” of graphic design from the 50s and 60s such as Saul Bass, Paul Rand or Fredun Shapur, especially in my more figurative illustration pieces. His work has been evolving for several years towards a more abstract language and this very rich period continues to influence him. Today, Vincent finds himself more in the work of artists such as Barbara Stauffacher Solomon or Karel Martens. “For me, their work is at the border between art and design,” comments the artist. Among his contemporaries, Vincent admires the work of Jonathan Lawes, Jeroen Erosie, Jan Van der Ploeg or Cody Hudson, to name a few. More generally, his work is also quite attentive to the architectural environment and the urban universe, perhaps a legacy of his adolescence painting on walls.

Currently, Vincent is developing a whole mural work around anamorphosis, in an abstract visual language. He states; “The place of an image in space and the resulting dialogue is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for me. In this logic of visual intervention in space, I’ve been experimenting for some time with a device mixing anamorphosis and augmented reality.”

Vincent hopes to continue to develop his experiments in print and on walls in a very close way, applying the same creative process. He is also keen to combine his two practices on the same media by experimenting more on canvas using both printing and painting.

@small_studio
www.smallstudio.fr