STATEMENT
Keight is a multidisciplinary artist who offers a variety of experiments and mediums, from “traditional” art over immersive installations to digital works. The profuseness of his work takes us on a journey into parallel but coherent universes, through the skilfully orchestrated construction of his conceptual and visual practices.

Keight is a form of “trapdoor”, which, from floor to ceiling, “catches” you, making you fall into “pit traps”, descend into basements or ascend into attics, to discover the secrets of our psyche that are buried deep or perched up high.

Keight is a designer + artist passionately dedicated to those two modes of interpreting reality, and an explorer of the invisible, who puts the entirety of his know-how into providing a visual, emotional, intellectual, and physical experience, allowing us to go beyond superficiality and pretence.

Keight is an invitation to live the metaphysical experience, expressed through artistic pieces that, like so many heightened states of consciousness emerging from his meditations, help awaken us to our deepest feelings.

Keight is visual, striking, seductive, effective, delirious; it is Orphic, symbolic, surreal, hip, whimsical, amazing, rare, digital, physical, experimental, ambitious, grand, dematerialised and above all: essential.

But Keight is also...

AN ARTIST STEEPED IN HERMETIC REFERENCES

To progress through Keight’s universe means to cross paths with such strange figures as Hermes Trismegistus (the ancient mystic quoted in Apollinaire’s poem “The Bestiary, or Procession of Orpheus”), but also with artists who, while certainly important on the contemporary scene, are not especially well known, such as Paul Laffoley, Alfred Latour, or Alex Grey. It also means encountering references that will be much more familiar, such as Edvard Munch, the Delaunays, Victor Vasarely, or Matt Mullican… What is the common thread between all these artists who feed Keight’s practice? They have a purely graphical focus, a type of visual metalanguage that manages to stand alone, due to a certain number of geometrical or expressionist and abstract references. This is because we navigate through a world of “signs”, in which references become simple anchors in the creation of a language based on pictograms, colour symbolism, and the power of “effects” as expressions of mental and emotional states. It is thus as a veritable designer of the psyche, or as an artist of language—or as both of these intertwined—that Keight approaches his own themes. For, once frames of reference and heritage are completely accepted, one more easily subscribes to a singular grammar, dizzying in its proliferations. By turns glamorous, haptic, and inescapable, or again hermetic, complex, and indecipherable, his artistic practice is constantly re-evaluated in a tête-à-tête with the viewer. This is also the condition of the “inner experience” to which Keight invites us, through a form of initiatory journey of consciousness, aimed at allowing us to ask ourselves the right questions while there is still time...

BIOGRAPHY
My name is Karim Bassegoda, aka Keight, and I was born in Lausanne in 1988. I live and work in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland, where my studio is located, near the city of Lausanne. In 2013, I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Communication, majoring in Graphic Design, from the Lausanne University of Art and Design (ECAL).

Throughout my career, my artistic work has been exhibited in different cities around the world, lending it international exposure. In 2012, I was selected to exhibit at the 2nd Graphic Art Biennial of Szeklerland, in Romania; then, following my training at ECAL, I took part in a project for Hors Pistes as part of an artist residency in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, where I worked together with industrial designers, graphic designers, photographers, artists, and artisans. The project was a success and was exhibited first in Ouagadougou, and then in Europe via Paris, Brussels, Milan, and Lausanne. As a finalist and exhibitor at various national and international competitions in Rome, London, Paris, Gimpo (near Seoul), Geneva, Martigny, and Lausanne, I became increasingly interested in intercontinental artistic exchanges.

Next to my artistic work, in which I develop my visual language and offer various workshops, I studied at the University of Teacher Education (HEPL) in Vaud, where I received a Master of Arts in Visual Arts Education in 2019. I then continued in the pedagogical field at the Swiss Federal University for Vocational Education and Training (SFUVET), where I completed my training with a federal diploma in teaching Design and Media.