Urban Poetry

Urban Poetry is a unique work built on a simple idea and radical: the canvas is split in two. The upper half is the wall ; the lower half lower section, the sky.

Lasveguix unfolds all his poster artist's vocabulary. On the upper section, the papers accumulate in relief: torn posters, torn off, layered, whose fibers rise up and crumple into a a true geography of material. One reads PARIS in white letters on a black background, one recognizes the yellow poster of the Louis Vuitton Foundation Louis Vuitton devoted to Basquiat, whose portrait screen-printed in fluorescent pink is crossed out by a large black, and one can make out the ghosts of the Velvet Underground, mentions of Pop Girl, by Richard, of Amsterdam. Deep blues, acid yellows, oranges and off-whites form a dense frieze and fragmented, with jagged edges like a cliff of paper. It is memory alive with a street wall, saturated with names, of advertisements and images that overlap without ever ever fade completely.

Below, everything stops. A vast expanse of blue turquoise, applied directly to the canvas from which one the texture can still be seen, opens up a space of silence. And that is where Jérôme Mesnager intervenes: his Man in White, traced in a few broad strokes to the brush, becomes stands with arms raised toward the upward — toward this chaos of papers, or perhaps toward the light. Born in 1983 in the streets of Paris, this silhouette luminous and anonymous is become one of the great icons of urban art French. Here, it is not more on the wall: it has has emerged. The gesture of open arms says the momentum, the breathing, the liberation.

The entire work lies in this contrast: density against emptiness, the noise against calm, the collective against the individual. A composition of great elegance graphic, where two generations of the scene urban come together around a same word — poetry.