Jordan Beal
About Jordan Beal
Jordan Beal (1991) is a Martinican visual artist and photographer who lives and works in Martinique. Self-taught, he works on commercial images for agencies and brands. Since 2018, Jordan Beal has been developing a photographic practice that explores the materiality of the medium, in particular by altering his negatives using corrosive solutions.
Jordan Beal’s photographic approach
Moving on the edge between reality and the imaginary, Jordan Beal's work mixes techniques and substances, situated visions and collective abstractions. Rooted in an experimental plastic mastery, the artist manipulates the photographic negative to reveal its tangible and poetic nature. Composing new ways of seeing the world, his works explore the present and history, and develop a free and powerful view of the concepts of nature and territory. New landscapes are born of the photographic medium, troubled and disturbed horizons that often conjure up the displacement of bodies and plants, natural and political borders, the opacity of waters, islands, seas and their languages.
His latest series « Linéaments » (2024) merges art and technology to question colonial narratives and the rewriting of history. By photographing AI-generated images while still blurry, he creates landscapes that oscillate between dream and reality, critiquing static representations of Martinique. His work challenges our perception and the invisible forces shaping it, with an aesthetic that is both captivating and unsettling.
Rather than simply replicating reality, Jordan Beal uses AI and Polaroid photography to blur the lines between the real and artificial, creating images that suggest timeless places where history feels suspended.
Exhibitions
His work has been shown in several group exhibitions, notably in the Caribbean and in France. He has also had solo exhibitions, including Pour faire le portrait d'une fleur (2022) and Non-lieux (2021). In 2023, his work was presented at the Biennale internationale des Rencontres photographiques de Guyane.
He was part of the group show AImagine - Photography and generative images at Hangar Photo Art Center with his work Linéaments.
Other group shows included Open Studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2024. He also took part in events such as This Is Not a Country at the B-Home Gallery in Dakar in 2024, and Take That Boudin at Studio Lumina in Martinique the same year. His work has also featured in exhibitions such as Sentinels at 14N61W Gallery in Martinique (2022) and Oxytocin at Tropiques Atrium in 2021.
Jordan Beal’s Residencies, awards and grants
Jordan Beal has participated in several artistic residencies, including 2025_Untold in 2025 at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine (Angers and Paris) and at Karukera Ballet in Guadeloupe. In 2023, he also took part in the Oyapock and Foto Kontré residencies during the Rencontres Photographiques de Guyane and in Martinique.
Jordan Beal is the first winner of the new grant to support French contemporary creation in the Caribbean and Amazon regions, launched by unRepresented, Rubis Mécénat and Station Culturelle, which will provide him with a production fund, professional mentoring to develop his artistic career and a solo exhibition Corrosion at unRepresented per Approche from 4 April 2025. As well as promoting an artist's work, this production grant aims to address the inequalities linked to visibility and mobility in the French Caribbean and Amazon territories.
