Marc Kandalaft. Anatomy of a visual thinker

CAREER PATH

Born during the tumultuous years of Lebanon’s civil war, Marc’s journey is a storied one filled with paradox and contradictory influences. Growing up in an expat community at the heart of European & American compounds in Saudi Arabia, his earliest canvases were painted with the desolation of the Arabian desert – cosmopolitan, prefabricated, and yet flavoured with the surreal Americanness of exile that was imposed, yet embraced.

Design. Visual art. Education. They are Marc’s calling. At first, they seem disparate, but each is a manifestation of his natural abilities as a visual thinker. Aesthetics, ideas, and language hold equal sway, and separately or as one, are informed by a wide range of influences. Marc’s body of work echoes American mythology, oriental mystique. Classical French history, and an ever-changing pop culture. Their synthesis generates an unmistakable originality.

Marc’s design career saw first light with the new millennia. 2006 brought his vision, drive, and passion to Canadian shores where he applied those multitude influences and experiences as a creative director. RAP (Rethink Act Provoke), founded in 2015, has become the working embodiment of his artistic and communication philosophy.

Across two decades that were simultaneously formative, evolutionary, and revolutionary, Marc has created an impressive range of sensitive, sensible, and sensory design work for a prestigious national and international clientele.

Sought after, appreciated, celebrated, and always progressive – his approach and originality has attracted, and pleased clients who’ve awarded him with mandates in the fashion, culture, and architecture segments. Among them Galerie Maria Lund, the Musée Rodin, LVMH, Piaff Boutique, Studio Canal, Equus Automotive, Philip Hazan Architect, Langlois lawyers, Sony Columbia, BY Venture Partners, Beautys Luncheonette, Elie Khoury Art Foundation, and Hôtel Gault.

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A DESTINATION EXPLAINED BY THE JOURNEY.
UNDERSTANDING MARC’S INDIVIDUAL, INFORMATIVE APPROACH TO COMMUNICATION AND DESIGN.  

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WONDERING WHILE WANDERING.
INFLUENCE IN TRANSIT.

Kandalaft was born in 1978 in war-ravaged Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest city, once renowned for its incredible Crusader-era citadel and mosques. His family fled with Marc only weeks after his birth, finding a new home amongst a small community of expats living in prefab mobile homes landlocked by an unrelenting Arabian desert. Summers saw them return to conflict-ridden Lebanon, riddled with the problems of a failing infrastructure interrupted only by terrorism and political upheaval.

The void of stifling idleness was filled by his vivid imagination, where handicrafts and handiwork became his escape from the limbo of statelessness and migration.

There, the nearby Dhahran Camp, Saudi Aramco’s gated American compound was his first exposure to ubiquitous U.S. culture. Complete with baseball diamonds, cheerleaders, hot dogs, and American cinema, it mimicked a typical Californian community. That meant a torrent of American culture flooded his senses. From MTV to Rambo, Top Gun and Footloose – Nike to Pizza Hut - Twin Peaks to Ford F150s and armadas of Humvees, the worthy and the worthless, Marc swam through a sea of culture, drinking in its vision, values, and verve.

The first Gulf War erupted in 1991, and clearly Marc’s photographic work is a startling, evocative reflection of this formative period in his life. The imagery is dark, foreboding, and speak clearly and loudly of nature and the environment as victims of human constructs and conflict. W.G. Sebald, German writer and academic, and once touted among the greatest living authors wrote: “We know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.”

Kandalaft's work is steeped in the nostalgia and ceaseless alertness of his exile experience. "War has undeniably affected my work. As a child of a third culture, I always had to step back in order to observe and analyze things. I learned at a very young age that there is no single absolute truth, only that which conflicts, contradicts, coincides, and creates new, multiple truths."

SELF-DISCOVERY

1993 saw Marc and his family displaced once again, this time to Paris where he eventually enrolled in the Penninghen School of Art Direction and Interior Architecture, originally founded in 1868 in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

The City of Lights was an ocean of arts, culture and visual references in which Marc could swim, dive, explore the depths and derive influence and inspiration. He was fortunate to study under Peter Knapp, formerly artistic director at Elle France during its hegemony in the 1960’s and 70’s. Etienne Robial, the highly influential graphic novel author and designer who helped shaped the audiovisual landscape GenXers grew up with in France. 

Penninghen placed the essentials of typography and image composition front and centre for Marc, and their importance in his canon cannot be understated. Marc sought out other luminaries there, admitting to regularly sneaking into audit classes by renowned artist Roman Cieślewicz. In fact, Marc’s firm grasp of the power of purity and minimalism are largely the result of the teaching of Michel Bouvet, celebrated poster artist and designer.

Beyond surfaces, Marc’s quest was one of mastering the principles of balance, symmetry, and disorder, and how they were reflected in the real world, and as interpreted by design. John Berger, Paul Feyerbend and, in particular, Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution served as sizable influences. 

David Carson emerged as a major figure in design early in Marc’s career, and his self-taught, deconstructed style represented unfettered freedom of expression, and the way forward. Marc scrutinizes the written word with the same fervour with which he does images. Purposeful deconstruction enables him to understand the innermost mechanisms of communication. From chaos emerges clarity.

CURIOSITY AS METHODOLOGY

To Marc, creation is a game of connections. Recognizing the links, the relationships, and their ceaseless interplay fascinate him. Classification plays a significant role for Marc, and since 2011 he’s been adding to a growing, and now ginormous online visual mosaic, one of the ways he keeps track of, and organizes his eclectic, absorbing interests. Progress, reflection, and technology help him evolve a series of archival and memory tools that classify and order images and text. These platforms favour both the diversity of narrative and visual mediums, essential for originality, and for making sense of the connections that govern our lives and our perception of it.

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EDUCATION THROUGH DESIGN

2016 saw the creation of Inspire Play Innovate, a singularly unique platform intended to introduce and explore the basic principles of creativity, design, branding strategy, and more fundamentally the notion of constant evolution and transformation to kids, students of all ages, and professionals.

Inspire Play Innovate has enjoyed considerable success, with workshops having made their way to seven cities across four continents. Among them The Milan Triennial, The Seoul Design Museum, and Mexico’s Casa Wabi. It’s a concept that informs, educates, and entertains with purpose and direction.

Marc is adamant that these don’t serve as “design thinking” workshops, believing rather that “design thinking” is a construct that more properly describes what our ancestors have already accomplished. He notes that the very word design implies intention and intelligence.

PRÉLUDE

His quest remains an honest, driven one: to decipher the code that governs everything, to understand how things work, and why. It’s an obsession that is at the same time artistic, scientific, and philosophical, as the divisions between these are human artifice and their overlap undeniable. His approach is fluid, dynamic, and organic, obeying no hierarchy and warily eying convention and caricature.

Marc Kandalaft is a consultant. Experience has taught him that moving away from the limiting model of the agency to one that is more flexible has greater creative potential and allows him to work with and be inspired by like-minded experienced professionals in tangential fields. He is developing and enhancing a new model, diverging from the expected so that his strength, the unexpected, can better be expressed. Rap is reemerging as KANDALAFT. A new era.

Through interaction, exchange, and collaboration with creative minds in architecture, curation, photography, sound, and emerging technology experts he is free to explore new visual landscapes and devote more time to his visual arts research and artistic development.

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MOST RECENTLY…

Among Marc’s most recent ventures is Blask, shouldered by an executive search specialist and an industrial/organizational psychologist, it promises to innovate and drive business optimization solutions for creative and tech industries.

Paris’ prestigious Penninghen School of Art Direction and Interior Architecture, has invited their former student to be a guest lecturer teaching the essentials of brand strategy next year [2023–2024]. Established in 1868 as a private studio school, Penninghen was home to renowned alumni the likes of Henri Matisse, Robert Rauschenberg, Fritz Lang, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, and Eileen Gray.

Marc has also been invited to teach and mentor bachelor's students at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in a design course focusing on brand strategy and identity.