Rich Graffiti Artist, Oxymoron??!

What does Bill Clinton, Bono, chef Jamie Oliver and JR, a 27-year old graffiti artist from Paris have in common? No, idea? Well, all have won the prestigious TED award which is given to exceptional individuals plus a merry little $100,000 to use in a humanitarian project. The award was announced on October 19th. 

JR, who by the way calls himself a photograffeur and not a street artist, has done a very interesting line of work. It all started when he found a photo camera on the subway. It all then spiraled from taking photographs of parisian thugs and importing them on the bourgeois districts to pasting huge photographs of palestinian and israeli people doing grimaces all over the “Wall”. In 2008, he chose Africa, Brazil and Asia, as his next destinations, and for his subjects, women!  He decided to portray their faces and paste them all over the public space, which of course is illegal. Far from finished, JR constantly moves from one location to the next to gather pictures. 

What is truly interesting about his work is that it doesn’t follow the classical rules of art. There is no personality attached to the work, no physical identity per se since he remains totally anonymous. There are no professional judges, no formal exhibition space and there is no price. The people are the subjects and the judges at the same time. The exhibition space is the biggest gallery in the world; the cities’ streets. In this art scene, there is no stage to separate the actors from the spectators. JR’s purpose is to show the world these people from those rural and urban spaces in a very peculiar manner, and he makes sure that these people stories' get heard. In an interview with the New York Times, he said: “If there’s one thing I’ve always taken care of with my work, it’s that it’s never an advertisement for anything other than the work itself and for the people it’s about — no ‘Coca-Cola presents’”.

Ok, so his work is really interesting and appealing but I think that it’s time to talk about what a particular person he is as well. Imagine someone who’s career started with a found camera and no previous artistic learning. Who installs his photographs, with just a bunch of friends to help him out and does it all around the earth. Nice, right?  And just to make him even cooler, every time he appears in public he wears a hat and dark sunglasses so as to remain as anonymous as possible. JR also owns a foundation that sells some of his photographs to museums or private collectors so that his camera keeps rolling. What’s so great about JR is that law and distances do not stop him from producing some shocking works. His motivation, his ideas and his carelessness for the law is what keeps him on the front line of compelling contemporary artists.

So he goes around pasting illegal 20-foot high photographs on your house and says stuff like “You never know who’s part of the police and who’s not”. That is what JR does. Raising eyebrows and stretching smiles.

JR / Exposition Paris 2009 - Ile Saint Louis
envoyé par JR. - Films courts et animations.

TRAILER " WOMEN ARE HEROES"
envoyé par JR. - Futurs lauréats du Sundance.

JR FACE 2 FACE // PARIS // BEAUBOURG
envoyé par JR. - Regardez plus de courts métrages.

Abstraction; Back and Forth

As I think, I abstract myself...

As I feel, I abstract myself...

As I believe, I abstract myself...

And every now and then, I come back...

- Monica Gro Mouret -

This series of photographs done by the Mexican photographer, Monica Gro Mouret invites us to travel. It doesn’t present landscapes you haven’t seen. Neither does it show people you haven’t met. Nor traditional costumes you haven’t touched. It is a journey into abstraction, a journey back and forth from this visual realm.

Monica has been concentrating on capturing close up images of plants, watery surfaces, and soap bubbles with an objective in mind: that future viewers will start to concentrate on lines and colors in objects while forgetting the object’s original form. In other words, it is a focus on form and not content, which thus explains the series title “Abstrayendome”.

As time is being put aside, it is space on which the emphasis is put on. The visual space from far to close, from recognizable to unrecognizable, from figurative to abstract is being put in motion. As you observe the recognizable, slowly unknown lines begin to appear, lines and shapes you didn’t notice at first but that are now unmistakably present. It is a focal movement that makes the viewer linger on details that he may not have seen before, but that are now strongly apparent. 

Grass stops being grass; it becomes lines of a incandescent green, all intertwined. Reflections on water stop being reflections; they become pencil-thin lines without any shape in particular and with no other purpose than the one of being there for themselves. It all becomes lines of different width, spots of different size and different chromatic intensity, and everything else is forgotten. 

Truly, Monica Gro Mouret has sought to take the viewer into abstraction, to create a focal movement from fore-ground to back-ground and back again, showing that these close-up images reveal details about elements that otherwise could not be perceived. Rhythms, parallels appear between the different stems of the cactus and improvisation, uncertainty on the water’s surface. 

This kind of work enables us to see the chromatic beauty and richness of shapes that lie in nature. In this way, objects such as cactus stems can be appreciated for their lines and colors and not for what they represent.

Etienne Bolze

Children Are Not that Innocent Anymore.

Children Are Not that Innocent Anymore.

John Hobday, a Canadian Toronto-based art director and photographer is now having an exhibit at the Gale Smith Gallery in Ottawa where he assembles dramatic real-life-based scenarios with children.  The exhibit, which started on September 17th and will last only until October 10th is called The Playroom and its composed of a dozen photographs  of children reenacting historical events such as 9/11, torture scenes from Abu Ghraib, and our own Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean eating a seal’s heart. Useless to tell you that it caused quite a stirr.

Yet, Hobday claims that his whole intention is far from wanting to shock children but more to show the world that childhood is not as innocent and blinded from the outside world as people might think. “People always ask me if I’m setting out to shock people, and I’m not. I think the shock comes from people being forced to acknowledge that kids experience these events, or are witness to them.”

The exhibit points out to the fact that children are aware of what’s going out in the world because of the banalisation of this sort of events and their massive presence in our everyday life through television, newspapers and magazines. “The playroom is a metaphor for the impossibility of a protective space from the world,” Hobin says. “It’s a metaphor for all the things that kids experience in the world, and how it’s all in their heads. This is an exaggeration of how it might come out.” Don’t blame the player, blame the game he seems to proclaim.

I remember myself playing with the images I saw on TV, which was Dragonball Z or Speed Racer. I would grab a carboard box and pretend it was my own race car. These children will eventually put into their imaginary and play with these images of dramatic events seen on television and magazines without understanding the consequences of the act just as I never thought that ramming my cardboard box down the stairs could have broken my leg. During the photoshoot of the 9/11 scene, one of the children aged 4 or 5 at the time, jolted “It’s the plane that hit the towers”. He definitely was aware of the event. 

Despite his intentions, which could remain doubtful, Hobin say’s he’s been widely criticized and called everything from a pervert to someone with prejudice against twins! “I want people to acknowledge the fact that kids see the scariest things that are out there.” he says.

Nevertheless, some blog-users and some parents remain optimistic and open to such practices.  Richard Verreault’s 7-year-old son Justin posed for “A Boo Grave,” modelled after the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture at the hands of U.S. military police.Verreault said that his son, who is a professional child model, was undaunted by the morbid set. “It was work, and he was there to do the shoot,” he said. “He had a good time — and he got to eat a few lollipops.”

Visit at L'Orangerie

At the beginning of the 20th century, industrial revolution was at its apogee. The first World War was raging. They were also about to face an economical crisis. In the midst of all that turmoil, an artist created a haven for peace and tranquility. It wasn’t a place in specific, nor a philosophy of life. It wasn’t either a book or a proposal for social reorganization and class equality. It was a serie of paintings. His name: Claude Monet. His work: Les Nymphéas.

In 1909, Monet declared about his project of Les Nympheas : “ A place were the overwrought would relax, taking example on the stagnant waters, and, for him who lived  in it, this room would have offered an shelter for a peaceful travel in this flowery aquarium”. Years later, in November of 1918, Monet gave some of his Nymphéas  to the french state as a monument to peace. Military peace but also to internal peace of men. These gifts were installed in the National Gallery of l’Orangerie in Paris and are still there to be viewed and experienced.

At l’Orangerie, I had the chance to visit his work.  It was constituted of two oval-shaped rooms  covered with his 6 meter-long paradises. I really wanted to test Monet’s theory on reclusion and peacefulness upon seeing his works. It revealed itself true. I was subdued in peace and admiration. In the middle of the rooms stand some abnormally long benches on which everyone was sited. I sat as well, joining the myriads of tourists. There were some signs asking the visitors to maintain silence. The museum directors were absolutely right. In order to better understand and experience these works, it was better to be seated and to keep silence so as to immerse one self into these purple and blue waters of never ending still/moving waters. Because of his particular technique the whole image is mesmerizing, mystified and physically moving because there is not one single predetermining sketch and every ‘coup’ is curved. I think I stayed for at least 45 minutes in front of one of the paintings, relaxing and thinking of nothing else. The itchiness of the tourists walking around and taking pictures vanished. As Monet said, one could be transported into his japanese garden at Giverny where he painted this canvases.  Monet’s intention was really to surround the viewer with his garden. He left behind the two-dimensional or even the three-dimensional classical painting to go for a fourth or even a fifth dimension by plunging the spectator into this flourished world. In it, one is surrounded and nothing else enters it’s world, he is alone in front of the painting and then when no one expects it, a sigh of relief, peace and tranquility comes out. Your back curves a bit by the relaxation of the muscles, your arms feel light, your problems disappear and then your imagination starts to float. 

I had seen another exposition of Monet in Milan at the Palazzo Reale. Nevertheless, the fact that l’Orangerie disposes the paintings in a circular motion around the spectator is what differentiated the two expos, one being impressive and the other simply immersing. This is a must for everyone traveling to Paris. It is a way to escape the stress of Paris’s traffic, on the road and sidewalk, and to relieve from the problem’s of everyday’s life for an instant and enjoy tranquility in one exquisite centenary-old japanese garden.