NOSBE

NOSBÉ – WHEN THE REPETITION OF THE PATTERN BRINGS LIFE OUT OF THE CONCRETE

November 2018 – 2035 words

FIRST STEPS

How did you become an artist?

I started drawing at a young age with my father. Neither of us knew how; he would draw the head and I the nose—or vice versa, drawing inspiration from Gaston Lagaffe, Tintin, or Achille Talon. In a way, it was my first approach to the clean line style. During my middle school years, I went to Tahiti, where I lived for four years. At that time, the island was experiencing a revival tattoos, with clean, sharp lines, depictions of gods' or animals' heads, ultra-clear lines without shading. Meanwhile, my older brother was listening to... heavy metal, This implies a different tattoo culture, but also album covers with incredible typography and characters. These two influences really took root in my mind and blended together.

When I returned to France in 1992, I started taking the RER and discovered Graffiti. Even before I practiced it, I already loved its colours and shapes.

FROM LINE TO FRESCO

What work have you done to refine your figure more and more?

I started painting fairly clean and neat things on the walls, with beautiful outlines, reminiscent of Polynesian tattoos. But at university I was doing a master's degree whose theme was «"Faces and lines of error"» By letting the pencil flow freely, faces appear. I started there, before improving my work with spray paint. This tool, which allows you to draw lines quickly and create a 2-4-2 gradient, appealed to me more than the brush. Then, by tirelessly repeating the line strokes, I began to refine them, give them volume, and so on.

You mainly work in black and white. Is this to give a greater impression of volume and depth?

Why black and white? It comes back to drawing and tattooing, but also to the reality of using fewer tools and resources. I spent a lot of time wandering around abandoned places and quickly realized I was carrying around twenty cans of spray paint in my bag to end up doing three pieces in black and white. All you need is a color that provides good contrast, like black, blue, or red, for the whole thing to blend well with the space you're working in. I generally don't buy this base paint; I usually just get it from the trash. I once ended up with thirty liters of pink paint that took me almost a year to use, or a blue dye that I used for six months.

With these few colors, my goal is to return to the essentials by getting closer to drawing. But if I've flourished in the use of black and white, it's also thanks to the influence of the people I've worked with more closely than others. I started painting seriously with Shaka, who gave me some pointers on basic techniques (gradients, purging, etc.). We painted together a lot and achieved good results, so good that we stopped. I also worked quite a bit with Piz, who wanted to paint like he drew with a ballpoint pen, with a lot of detail and effects. By observing this approach, by practicing it myself, I also realized that playing with line thickness worked well, and that using color requires both more time and more thought.

The spray can is a tool that provides a strong marking on the wall.

The more time passes, the less I use spray paint, preferring to work with rollers and brushes. But spray paint still has several advantages: it works everywhere, regardless of the surface or wall texture. It also offers great maneuverability and allows for certain effects. Finally, it allows for significantly faster work. It's also a hallmark of graffiti culture. However, it remains quite harmful, and I've even experienced a near-fainting spell in a poorly ventilated area.

How do you manage to maintain spontaneity in your line and create an "automatic drawing" when your works are very structured?

I have a collection of billions of little elements in my head that I use depending on my mood and the time of year. For a very long time, I only drew faces, then my lines began to transform into creatures. I then tried to compose my faces in such a way that all the lines could become flowers or animals. By making the forms more complex, I tried to organize the whole, to balance the imbalance. To arrange these elements, I started with a broad base and gradually added things within it. Thus, each motif contributes to the whole, while remaining independent. Over time, I've tended to move more and more towards abstract forms.

THE DEFORMATION OF LIVING THINGS

Does this explain the distortion you inflict on living things in your creations?

I've filled miles of paper exploring every aspect of life. Since I don't do architectural drawing, the curve here doesn't refer to something dead, but rather to something perpetually changing. Vegetation, blood cells, bones: everything has been traced, more or less, onto a sheet of paper. Repeating these motifs when I was younger instilled them in my memory and in my hand. By chance, I occasionally create new forms. I recently recreated Indonesian barongs, which I'd seen four years ago, by searching for them in my memory and my photographs.  

These motifs are also constantly evolving. We start with a tube, only to discover, upon inflating it, that it transforms into a stomach. A hole in this stomach allows plants to grow there, which then become carnivorous. It also often happens that these attempts fail and transform into something else. A failed dolphin becomes a swordfish, which ultimately turns out to be a hybrid of the two animals. Chance and error, therefore, play a significant role in my work.

Through this accumulation you create several levels of interpretation, and the viewer first perceives an overview before isolating the different elements.

Initially, all the elements were on the same level. But gradually, I wanted one of them to stand out. I like to detail several of them to offer different interpretations of the work. Furthermore, I sometimes place cells at the level of much larger elements, disregarding scale to create a unified whole. However, I always include some reference points to help the viewer orient themselves.

Anything can happen to these living forms. They get twisted, cut in two, entangled in barbed wire… What amazes me is that Mother Nature has thought of everything: a deep-sea fish is far stranger than one of my creations. Compared to that, my forms are figurative, albeit gently hallucinatory and reimagined.

You always seem to start with the eye as the central element. Is this a structural or symbolic motif?

Rather than "eye," I would speak of "eyes." I start with the face, and most creatures often have two. Beginning with the eyes helps to balance the whole thing. If I'm starting on a wall and I only have a can of black spray paint, I'll start there. If I have a roller, I'll start with an undercoat and then work my way into the details. But often I paint all around before finishing with the eyes and the signature.  

But the eyes also have a symbolic dimension: they are round, which naturally connects them to my forms. They are reminiscent of cells, or the heart of flowers. Furthermore, they are moist and form the only openings to the outside world, like the mouth, interacting with everything around us. I appreciate this open and moist aspect of our bodies, as if we were constantly exposed, while everything else is dry.

PAINTING IN WASTELAND

Why did you start painting outdoors?

I started painting on walls so I could bring to life on a much larger scale what I drew on paper. Spray paint also allows me to work faster, completing a piece three meters by two or more in an afternoon. As for the location, I've painted and will continue to paint in abandoned places, for the sheer joy of discovery, the act of painting itself, and the atmosphere, but it's not always easy to find them, and I've often worked in graffiti scenes that have their own unwritten rules. Until recently, I had one of the best graffiti spots in the Île-de-France region, just five hundred meters from my home. A superb warehouse that had been in operation for twenty years, a high-quality scene with some beautiful murals, which encouraged artists to be more discerning. This kind of place fosters a sense of community, through encounters with other graffiti artists and a public of passersby and photographers.

What is the importance of this urban context in your work, given that it has two specific characteristics that seem incompatible with the street: it is not necessarily seen and it requires a lot of time?

I rarely paint in the street itself. I'm not from Paris, but from the suburbs, and tagging my city is of little interest, especially since I'm known to the local authorities, who would send me a letter, or several, the very next day. So I've never really been a graffiti artist, and when I lived in Paris, I rarely painted a truck or a shutter after a night out.

The truth is, I like to take my time, without stress. I don't paint for the adrenaline rush, but to have a good time and achieve a result I'm happy with. However, adrenaline can be a good way to get to the heart of the matter because the speed of execution allows me to avoid unnecessary embellishments. My favorite spots are therefore often secluded, abandoned, or tolerated. Indeed, a good painting takes me between two and three hours of work, and it's difficult to find that time in the street without running into problems at some point. When you're in a group, it's also harder to stay focused, and pleasant afternoons spent with friends don't always produce the best paintings, even if we're having a good laugh.

Do you photograph your works for archival purposes?

Most of the time, yes. Photography serves as an archive of the room, but not only that. In a neglected space, I can spend an hour searching for the right spot between the cracks in the wall and the light, driven by the desire to create a beautiful image. The interplay with the surface is a significant part of my work. I painted damaged lungs in the room with the hooks from an iron mine, because everything fit perfectly in that setting: a pipe, a broken window, a filthy wall.

It's certainly good to have a record, but even if there's a lot of paint that I didn't photograph for various reasons, the memories still remain. 

What is your relationship to the inherently ephemeral nature of your work?

In a very busy spot, I once saw one of my paintings defaced barely half an hour after I finished it, painted over by two kids… it's not pleasant, but it's also how you gain perspective. In the street, if you've taken the risk of doing something unauthorized, it's very unpleasant to have it painted over (and very frowned upon to paint over someone else's), whether by a painter, a poster artist, or anyone else. Poster artists like graffiti and often set up their work on top of it, making as many enemies as there are people who have drawn or tagged underneath. Once you've finished your piece on a wall, it no longer belongs entirely to you; you abandon it to the place and to the gaze of passersby, if there are any.

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