FAULT Focus: An Introduction to Street Art in Paris
For the coming month, FAULT Online will be running a series of interviews with Parisian street artists as part of our FAULT Focus series – an in-depth look into the methodology of the creative people who inspire us.
It’s probably fair to say that most people outside of Paris weren’t aware of French street art until they saw Banksy‘s 2010 documentary, Exit Through The Gift Shop. In it, the manic Thierry Guetta‘s grainy video footage of Parisian artists such as Monsieur André, Zevs and Invader – Guetta’s cousin – clambering up the city’s ancient walls or across its slate rooftops in the middle of the night to paint, stencil, paste or tile.
French street art looks different to a lot of what you come across in Britain or the USA. There is, not surprisingly, a sense of connection with an older, more mainstream artistic tradition. Sure, there are the anarchic tags and slogans that can be found in nearly every urban environment in the world, but there are also Invader’s surprisingly beautiful tile renditions of old-skool, bit-mapped Space Invaders, Fred Le Chevalier‘s stark black and white drawings of spooky, Emily The Strange-like girls (and boys), Bonom‘s gorey, building-sized collages, and Le Diamant‘s diamonds crafted from glass fragments, set like jewels on the most unlikely inner-city surfaces. There are projects like the 2010 Mausolée, 40,000m2 of specatcularly intricate, almost otherworldy spray-painted surfaces, created by a team organised by local street art stars, Lek and Sowat, in the ruins of a former supermarket in the north of the city.
Street art thrives in Paris, in part, because there is a measure of tolerance on the part of city managers and the police. They come down hard on taggers, who they look at as vandals, but they often turn a blind eye to the painters and pasters whose works beautify many of the not-beautiful parts of the city’s north and east. City-funded initiatives like le M.U.R. actively encourage artists to create works for designated ‘art walls’ and there are even state-subsidised urban art festivals.
French street art is finally getting the international awareness and respect it deserves. What sets it apart or, some of us would argue, above the ubiquitous hoodie pranksterism of, say, Britain’s post-Banksy wanna-bes or the anaemic and opportunistic sloganeering of the US’s Shepard Fairey is its headier mix of ideas, cultural differences – Paris’ large African and Arabic communities are adding their own, nervy take to it – and intellectual discourse. Whether it survives the allure of gallery shows and six-figure price tags for the better-known names is too soon to tell.
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Read the rest of our FAULT Focus series on Parisian street art:
FAULT Focus: French Street Art – Interview with Le Diamant
French Street Art – Madame Moustache