Le Dédale, parcours d’art dans l’espace public
Belvès, Dordogne, France, 06/2016
Quand on me propose de participer au Dédale à Belvès, je pars tout de suite arpenter les rues du village à la recherche d’idées pour y intervenir. Habitué à intervenir en ville, créer dans les rues d’un village si charmant et harmonieux représente pour moi un vrai challenge. Rapidement, je remarque la présence d’un certain nombre de maisons inoccupées aux ouvertures condamnées par des planches de bois. J’ai alors l’idée d’intervenir directement sur ces planches et vieux volets clos pour mettre en valeur les bâtiments sans les dénaturer, sans toucher à leurs pierres. Peindre sur ces supports éphémères, témoins marginaux d’une activité interrompue, leur redonne une certaine dignité et leur octroie à nouveau un rôle honorable dans la ville : support d’œuvre d’art.
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.
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Ongoing project
November 2013 – today
The Promenades Project is about walking, observation and spontaneity. It’s about wandering in the city with no pressure, no time limit, no goal apart from walking and enjoying it. It’s about walking with total freedom of time and space to be able to do all that things that you always want to do but you don’t because you have no time. It’s about moving crosscurrent in the city with time for contemplation to be able to observe details that most people don’t notice.
Rules
Rule #1: Walk and, if possible, create something on the way. Rule #2: Only use material found during the walk – the only material I allow myself to bring is for
documentation (notebook, phone, camera) and a bag. Rule #3: Only execute ideas created during the walk – or a predecessor walk. Rule #4: Enjoy the walk.
This journal is a straight chronological transcription of what happened during each walk.
Panoramic animation (pass your mouse over the image to move it).
Based on the idea of a running frieze that would tie the neighborhood together, I painted each individual spot envisioning a design that would run from door to door. At first I thought we would ask the people and then paint, but actually the project turned out differently. The first door I decided to paint was the entrance of an abandoned house so we decided to paint it without asking permission. While I was painting this first door, locals who were passing by asked us what we were doing and started to spontaneously offer their own doors. At that point I decided that it would make more sense to just follow the flow of people offering their doors – that way I wouldn’t control the way the frieze was growing in and around the neighborhood.
Rustavi is the fourth largest city in Georgia. During the second half of the 20th century, the city was rebuilt by the Russians as an important industrial center with around 90 factories implanted on its territory. Chkondideli, the neighborhood where we worked, used to be a dormitory neighborhood for immigrants working at these factories. After 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, almost all the factories were closed down and the unemployment rate jumped to 65%. Today only two factories are still in use.
Pictures by Tamara Bokuchava and Eltono.
Thanks Tamara, Nini, Data, Manu, everyone who helped to accomplish the project and of course all the residents from Chkondideli.
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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
Désolé, cet article n’est pas encore disponible en français. En attendant, vous pouvez toujours le lire en English ou en Español.
4th Biennale d’Art Contemporain Le Havre, France
September 28th 2012 – May 15th 2013
Directed by Linda Morren and curated by Kevin Grottaglia
Signalétique Libre
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.
Ready to be installed outside
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.
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.
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.
Real inspiration...
Peinture au Cordeau Traceur
(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.
