Ministry of Culture
182, rue Saint Honoré, Paris, France
April 3rd – May 3rd 2015
Périmètre au Sol is the exact measurement of the line separating the public space from the private space around the Ministry of Culture building on Saint Honoré Street in Paris. I drew the generated line on four big papers (3,70 m x 1,40 m), each one representing one façade. The color code I used is two warm colors for the South and West façades and two cold colors for North and East.
Somerset House
London, U.K.
Exhibition curated by A by P
22 January – 15 February 2015
www.a-by-p.com
www.somersethouse.org.uk/visual-arts/mapping-the-city
10 Promenades
Acrylic on wood 122 x 100 cm
For Mapping the City, I presented a sculpture made out of the 10 unplanned walks I did in Beijing in late 2013 and early 2014. I wanted to present the routes in a way as random as the walks happened so I decided to hang them from their center of gravity instead of their cardinal orientation.
More info about the Promenades project here: www.eltono.com/projects/promenades
For inquiries about this artwork, please contact A by P here: www.a-by-p.com/more-info/#contact
Moscow, Russia
September 2014
RUFO – Rudimentary Unidentified Frictional Object
I have been doing research around the idea of “creating while walking” for a long time now (see the Promenades Project I did in Beijing: www.eltono.com/en/projects/promenades), my last idea was to register friction during a walk and I came up with the idea of RUFO – RUFO is a typical dog name in French and also the name of a toy dog that was released in the 80´s. I decided the four letters would stand for “Rudimentary Unidentified Frictional Object”.
Basically, I wanted to drag an artwork along a defined path and register the way it decays. I was doing tests around this idea when I was asked to participate in Artmossphere Biennial in Moscow so I decided to do the first RUFO experiment in the street of the Russian capital. I painted 11 wood boards with bold colored graphics and one by one dragged them around the city on different paths I had selected earlier (around the exhibition space, in random neighborhood, around the Red Square, around the hotel…). Each walk was between one and two kilometers, except for RUFO #9 where I walked for 2,5 kilometers and the painting almost disappeared entirely. Having the artwork interacting with the outside was crucial – showing artworks in the state they came out of the studio doesn’t interest me – my idea was to “print” the city onto each board turning them into witnesses of a walk, an experience. On the back of each board I showed the map of the walk and all the data generated (date, time, duration, distance and name of the streets wandered) – note that during the biennial, I showed reproductions of the back of the boards on spare boards for the people to understand better the story.
Pictures by Natalia Solovieva – Thanks to everybody at Artmosspere and to the people from Codered.
Jonathan Levine Gallery
525 W 22nd Street, New York, USA
7 August – 24 august 2013
Curated by Marc and Sara Schiller
Since I started painting geometric shapes using masking tape I have always found the moment right before pulling the tape off very interesting. At first, it looks a bit uncontrolled and messy but with a closer look, you can already begin to see an organized structure among the chaos of the tape and paint. Because painting in the street (for obvious reasons) has to be a quick action, this moment where the paint and the tape exist simultaneously is always extremely short. The idea for this new series called “One Minute Before” is to generate a collection of drawings based on the re-creation of this brief moment just before the tape is pulled off and the painting is revealed – a moment that, apart from myself, very few people have ever seen. All the drawings are based on real paintings that exist or have existed in the street, most of them painted illegally.
The first three drawings of this series were created in Beijing in June 2013 using pencil, acrylic and watercolor on paper.
This new series of work was presented to the public for the first time during the Wooster Collective 10th Anniversary Show at the Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York in August of 2013.
To ask about availability and prices of these artworks, please write an email to: artworks@eltono.com
Doppelgaenger Gallery
Via Verrone 8, Bari, Italy
June 25th – September 15th 2013
Curated by Vittorio Parisi – directed by Antonella Spano and Michele Spinelli
I presented three works for the Fresh Flâneurs exhibition in Bari: 8 Linee attraverso 4 Punti, a random painting experiment on a wall inside the gallery, Schegge, a new participative installation from the series Astillas and a mural painting on a public building in the city.
“8 lines made of 4 points” – Following a very simple set of predetermined rules, I painted eight lines; each one of them was made of four points randomly positioned on a defined plane.
As in previous Astillas installations, I individually painted 41 pieces of wood I found in the streets of Bari. Before the opening, I arranged the pieces on the floor leaving the construction of the installation and the evolution of its compositions in the visitors’ hands.
Three façades (12 x 5, 12 x 5 and 12 x 8 m.) on a city maintenance building on via Matteo Renato Imbriani.
Thanks to Dopplegaenger Gallery: Antonella, Michele, Vittorio and Eugenio, to Carlo and Giovani and to LUCE.
4th Biennale d’Art Contemporain
Le Havre, France
September 28th 2012 – May 15th 2013
Directed by Linda Morren and curated by Kevin Grottaglia
I built the Signalétique Libre (free signage) installation exclusively for the Le Havre Contemporary Art Biennial. It will be exhibited on the Jules Ferry square until May 15th 2013.
My idea was to take advantage of the location, a wide open space and very transited – which means a significant pedestrian flow and enough wind – to do a mobile installation. The work was conceived around an idea I have already worked with several times: give the spectator, each time they see the artwork, the possibility to see new compositions. Signalétique Libre questions urban visual communication – very direct, concise and at times even alienating – concentrating in the same reduced space 20 signs with abstract designs, without any intelligible message, that remained in constant motion. The pedestrian is free to interpret what the signs want to communicate or indicate, an open space for the viewer to stop receiving messages and perhaps start to emit them.
Exterior pictures by Mikaël Lesueur
Thanks to Linda Morren, Kevin Grottaglia, Mikaël, Paul and all the crew at the Musée Maritime et Portuaire du Havre.
Parcours artistiques dans (et avec) l’espace public
Besançon, France
September 6th – October 6th 2012
Project in collaboration with MOMO
This summer MOMO and I were invited to do our fourth collaboration together for the Bien Urbain festival in Besançon, North-East of France. We worked on two exercises: the first one, called Improbables, was an exercise about doing compositions with pieces of wood in unused gaps in the city. The second one is called Peinture au Cordeau Traceur (Paint Snap-Line) and is an adaptation of the traditional chalk line tool. The technique we developed allowed us to trace long lines on a building of almost any height using paint instead of chalk.
Together with Bien Urbain, we edited a zine about these two projects:
www.justeici.bigcartel.com/product/momo-eltono-zine-poster.
We came up with this idea after noticing a lot of small, unused spaces on walls all around the city. After collecting scrap wood, we loaded up our cart with the wood and our tools. Then, as we walked around the city, we installed simple wooden compositions in every gap we found interesting. All the pieces were put into place using only tension – no nails nor glue were used. The end result were 52 installations found all around the “Battant” quarter in Besançon. On an individual level, the pieces were quite discreet and often looked like some cheap repair work; but when people started noticing the series, they immediately realized that something was happening… We were amazed by how intact the pieces remained and how slowly they disappeared. The hardest part of this project was to try to make the installations NOT look like pieces of art.
(Paint Snap-Line)
For this project, we used the traditional chalk line tracer tool as our inspiration and conducted experiments eventually developing a similar tool that enabled us to mark long straight lines on buildings with paint. After a few drawings, we came out with a design and using the material available to us in Bien Urbain’s basement, we built the artifact. We did three tests, threw paint everywhere and finally came up with a satisfactory result.
Pictures by Sierra, MOMO and Eltono.
Thanks to David, Lucile and to the whole Bien Urbain crew.
Cicus
Seville, Spain
May 8th – May 31st 2012
Project curated by Delimbo
What is graffiti? What is this thing called Urban art? Is this graffiti? Art? Where are the limits? Who sets them? Esto No Es Graffiti (This is not graffiti) is an exhibition about something called and labeled in many different ways; but in essence, is vivid and spontaneous creation, with disparate methodologies, millions of points of views, and no written rules. The only thing that remains clear is that this is not Graffiti. Graffiti is in the street and it’s free, enjoy it while it still exists – Esto No Es Graffiti, text by Seleka, curator of the show for Delimbo.
For the Esto no es Graffiti show, I presented three artworks, two of them in collaboration with Seleka.
360 x 330 cm, cut off drywall
The first artwork is called Absence. Based on the name of the show and reflecting on the issue of showing graffiti in private spaces, I drew shapes cutting the drywall that protected the original brick wall. The result exhibited was the absence of the artwork, thus claiming the street as its original base.
Seleka and Eltono
200 x 150 cm each piece – Spray on 300 gr Fabriano paper – Spray on wall and photographic print
The second artwork I showed, in collaboration with Seleka, was also a reflexion around the act of showing graffiti in an exhibition space. We produced a drawing on paper and an illegal painting in the street. The painting in the street was the negative shape of the one on the paper. Inside the exhibition, we hung the drawing along with a life size picture of the illegal piece in the street.
Seleka and Eltono
400 x 200 cm, wood and spray paint
For the third artwork, we assembled a wooden collage on a wall and worked on top of it; first I started with tape and then Seleka used paint. Once the piece was finished, we asked Marcos, who was in charge of installing and assembling all of the pieces in the show, to disassemble the piece and reassemble it in a different order. We did not interfere in the composition of the piece and let chance and the assembler’s criteria decide the final appearance. The idea of not controlling the final result of the work is inspired by the deterioration that can be observed in the pieces painted in the city: factors out of the artist’s control change a painting gradually until, in most cases, it disappears completely.
Photographs by Delimbo and Eltono
Thanks to Laura and Seleka, Marcos and Domingo
