A report on my street art practice on French TV in 2018
Mycælium
Mycælium is a personal urban art project growing mushrooms in the street from an invisible, artistic mycelium linking different places, through 3D printed and spray painted models and posters. Besides the obvious lack of natural elements and the overdose of grey these mushrooms can fight in most cities, they are a metapher for an ethos linked to the fascinating specifics of the mushroom kingdom.
Neither animals, plants, minerals nor bacteria, still shrouded in mystery as science does not yet know much about them, they defy many human thoughts about life: they have a diverse array of reproduction methods, from asexual cloning to a world record of 30.000 sexes, they can sustain life and mercilessly feed on death, and they come in literally every shape and colour. Speaking of sex, with their often phallic appearance, they are also culturally associated to fertility or virility.
Also, we wouldn't have the forests we have without them, as they were allegedly the first living organisms on land, breaking down minerals, and paving the way for the vegetal colonisation of continents, that allowed all the other terrestrial animals (including us) to thrive. Even today, trees exchange nutrients and information about incoming threats through the most beautiful symbiosis, called mycorrhiza: the hidden part of the fungi iceberg, the underground network called the mycelium, is acting much like the Internet and the welfare-state of the forests. Some of them, virtually invisible, living on the leaves, can help trees to resist droughts, floods, hurricanes, starvation and pathogens.
Rather than hiding the texture that comes with 3D printing, I chose a voxel (3D pixel) style that would actually emphasize the layered flavour of the technique
Mycælium as featured in the streets of Bordeaux in France, Berlin in Germany (including the great Urban Spree) and Yerevan in Armenia.
^ A sculpture based on a modular approach of the same aetshetics
> A patch glued on vinyl to exhibit in Bordeaux's Contemporary Art Museum (CAPC)
V Death as a cigarette butt, meant to make people think twice about this ocean life
killing gesture
100x70cm, 2016. Polystyrene, clay, vynil mirros, acrylic, smartphones.Theme: Screens Everywhere. Made for national (France) urban art show Les Vibrations Urbaines de Pessac (Bordeaux).
#AutoHypNum, or "Narcissism Of Digital Hypnagogia".Sometimes, digital overdose can only offer oneself on display - the self that you can see on this proliferation of mirror-screens: a fragmented, distorted self, much like the one behind virtual identities. #AutoHypNum is a selfie machine: your body is the exhibition.The omnipresence of the user-centric culture seems to be more strengthening the confusion between our image and our intimate self, than nurture a better understanding of it.Eulogy of the surface: am I only what I can show and express?
3rd Prize at national urban art contest and exhibition Les Vibrations Urbaines de Pessac 2016 (Bordeaux).
#Autohypnum
Miscellaneous
+ augmented street art
This big piece (70x100cm, Posca brushes, watercolour, bronze powder and acrylic coating) was made for a national urban art contest and group show, Les Vibrations Urbaines de Pessac. The theme was "Man VS Wild".
I chose to work on the wild and animal side we all have, and how our addictions to information / digital / intellectual activities make it harder and harder to tap in that powerful, most enjoyable and playful resource. The main animal is the pig, because it's the animal that symbolizes enjoying material/flesh/food pleasure the best. Being somewhere between vegetarian and vegan, of course, it also draws a parallel between how society tolerates horrible treatment of animals as long as it's hidden away from the commoner, and how it's normal for a lot of people to put the outcome of that process in their belly, as a form of cognitive dissonance: not seeing the animal inside the human, and the human inside the animal.
Before NFTs built a proper home for digital art, my practice began to mix all the different forms I was playing with (animation, music, virtual reality painting, AR, 3D printing), accessible through AR technology.