KENT Hommage au Facteur Cheval
KENT 1957
Hervé Despesse, known as Kent, was born in Lyon in 1957. Lead singer of the French rock/punk band Starshooter from 1978, he is also a comic strip author and illustrator. The group enjoyed some success with the songs Batsy Party and Get Baque. Navigating between provocation and humour, its musicians howled the anger of a generation in the seventies. For fear of becoming bored, the group split up in 1982, allowing Kent to embark on a more poetic solo career, which he continues to pursue to this day. In 1990, he scored a hit with his single J’aime un pays. He also devoted himself to the creation of several comic strips. Between 1982 and 1986, he published six albums with Humanoïdes Associés and Futuropolis.
Four music albums were produced with the group Starshooter until 1981. Since embarking on a solo career, Kent has created eighteen albums, the most recent being La grande illusion in 2017. In his career as an illustrator, his best-known comic strip is Les aventures de Bob Robert l’aviateur (The Adventures of Bob Robert the Aviator) in 1985. In 2013, the Adel Gallery in Lyon presented his work during the Rêvisions event.
Hommage au Facteur Cheval 2008
His painting, Hommage au Facteur Cheval, features the Postman Cheval and the Three Giants, and follows on from his 2009 concert. In the foreground, the moustachioed man wears his kepi pulled down over his head and his rural postman’s outfit. His features are hard, his skin pink, and a single line is enough to draw his eyebrows. His neck is thin and his head high. With pensive eyes, he seems to be observing the Three Imposing Giants approaching from the green land. They were named by the Postman Cheval as “Caesar, the great Roman conqueror, Vercingétorix, the great defender of Gaul, Archimedes, the great Greek scientist”. The architect also inscribed on his monument: “Under the guardianship of the Three Giants I have placed the epic of the humble bent under the furrow.” Irradiated by the setting sun, the giants draw their shadows on the ground. Finally, as if to symbolise the postman’s constant reflection, clouds rise from his kepi to form behind the Three Giants. Having emerged from a dream, they are free to travel the world to spread the fame of their architect.