William Mapan

William Mapan was born in 1988 in France and he is currently based in Paris. He studied multimedia and communication at IUT Blois, and in 2012 completed the Digital Creation and Development program in web and mobile at Gobelins, l’école de l’image. He worked for more than a decade as a creative developer in the advertising and technology industries before turning to art full-time. He later returned to Gobelins as a professor, where he teaches interactive and creative coding. He also practices film photography, painting, dance, and sport as part of his wider creative exploration.

His practice centers on using code as a language for human expression. He begins with hand-drawn sketches and studies in color, often translating digital outputs back into gouache to mix pigments by hand before re-encoding them as algorithms. He approaches the computer as a collaborator, one that extends his gestures into digital space and introduces chance, error, and unpredictability into the process. His works are marked by painterly textures and organic forms, giving the digital canvas the tactility of pastel, pencil, or paint. He often limits himself to simple systems written in JavaScript, avoiding high-level libraries in favor of clarity and direct control, allowing discovery to emerge through iteration and trial. This emphasis on process is evident in series like Anticyclone, where he sought to convey movement and emotion through shifting palettes, Distance, which reinterprets Paul Klee’s chromatic harmonies, and Sketchbook A, a reflection on childhood memory and the materiality of drawing. Mapan draws inspiration from Klee, Matisse, Etel Adnan, Helen Frankenthaler, and the Abstract Expressionists, regarding color as his primary medium and a language through which he builds relationships with mood, memory, and identity. For him, generative art is a way of bridging analog and digital, carrying forward art historical dialogues while opening space for personal experience and transmission.

Mapan has exhibited internationally in solo and group contexts since 2022. His work has appeared at art fairs and institutional collaborations, including Paris+ par Art Basel at the Grand Palais Éphémère and a commission for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in partnership with Cactoid Labs. He has held exhibitions with galleries such as Kate Vass Galerie in Paris, Tonic in New York, Verse in London, and Avant Arte in London. His works have also been included in museum surveys such as Infinite Images: Art of the Algorithm at the Toledo Museum of Art and Neo-Techne: Art in the Age of the Machine at the Museum of Art+Light. His work has been auctioned at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and he was recognized in the NFT Now NFT100 list of influential figures in digital art in 2023.