Julien Deniau aka Unavista

French photographer, DOP, painter and skateboarder, living between Barcelona and Paris since 2000.

Julien has been working as a freelance photographer for skateboard magazines in europe and internationaly for more than 30 years, for magazines like, Tricks, Sugar, Kingpin, Place, Soma, Freestyler, Monster, Free and more… This gived him the opportunity to travel in numerous countries to document these journeys. In 2005, he became interested in painting and in drawing, which allowed him to express himself in a different way, other than through photography and video. Here he shows what cannot be represented by camera, can often be shown through imagination.

He work only with used skateboards, because recycling is really important for him, he found interesting to use skateboards that have been living in the street and been used by some professionals or non professional skateboarders. Sometime he use some broken skate where you can see the cracked wood and the way the skateboarder broke it.

Working with those recycled skateboards is like giving them a second life as a piece of art.

Julien found much of his inspiration, through his interest for street art and folk art,which he discovered in journeys to Bolivia, Mexico,Indonesia, Thailand, Africa and to the US.

He is using different materials like acrylic or oil painting and Poscas, trying to make his sculptures with some perfect symmetry, perfect lines and folkloric patterns. Julien’s work is always evolving.

On the last years he did tree different series of art, thinking about the environment, the global warming, the endangered animals and the way the humans are thrashing the planet.

He is trying to give a message with his art , not to do something only decorative.

- In 2017 he did a series entitle “ save the planet” with some people wearing some Gaz masks, each one on a different environement like a nuclear park, the social medias, the earth burning…

- In 2018 he started a series entitle “ sport 4 Earth” , showing some famous athletes playing with the actualities. With the plan to make an artshow during the Olympics games 2024 in Paris.

- In 2019, his last series is called “ Endangered animals”; with as the title say a series of endangered animals in different situations.

- In 2021, he did a series called “ Inspakt Da Decks”; with a series askate sculptures representing some Hip Hop artists from the 90’s, exhibited in Paris and Barcelona.

contact him:  unavista@hotmail.com