Roustan (American, b. 1979) is a body painter and photographer who treats the human body as both a canvas and a subject, using paint that lasts only hours before it is photographed, filmed, or performed live.Based in Los Angeles, he has painted directly on skin for more than twenty years, adapting the same practice to photography, television, and virtual worlds.,
Born Paul Roustan and raised in Chicago, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002 and a Master of Arts in Teaching from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006. He began body painting in 2005 after pitching an untested idea for a photo spread to the magazine Boink, and found that the painted body kept changing the image even after he had put down the brush. In 2011 he won the airbrush category of the North American Bodypaint Championships with Skull Dove, an image he later adopted as his personal logo. His body-painting photography has since been collected in three hardcover books and shown at venues including Arch Enemy Arts in Philadelphia, Fountain Art Fair in New York, and Arts Undressed in Miami.
He carried the same live, ephemeral process into the metaverse, painting models on screen during the “VERTEX” series of performances at the Decentraland club Dollhouse, alongside music producer GucciToe and the series' founder Tangpoko.Avatars at these events wore body-painted wearables he had created, filling the dance floor with his imagery while he painted live on screen.,He had minted his first NFT on OpenSea in March 2021, and opened a virtual gallery in Decentraland, an Ethereum-based virtual world, where he has staged solo and group exhibitions, held release parties, and sold virtual wearables drawn from his body-painting work.
