Evazesir
RECOMPOSING OUR MEMORIES
COURSE
How did you become artists? How did you start out on the street?
Sir: I started painting in Bourges, where I'm from, in abandoned places. Through urban exploration, I found derelict barracks, before gradually starting to tag and spray paint. I opened up a space that, within two years, was completely covered.
Eva: We met in 2007 in Lyon, when I had absolutely no involvement in street art. At that time, we belonged to the same collective – No Rules Corp. I was a visual artist working on canvas. He introduced me to urban exploration and then encouraged me to do on a wall what I had previously done on a painting. It was a kind of reciprocal learning process, because in turn, I brought him into my studio. We shared these approaches before blending them a few years later.
Sir: It was indeed in Lyon that I started painting in the street, because I found very few abandoned spaces. I began with tagging, then moved on to stencils on the slopes of the Croix-Rousse. At that time, I could almost have argued that my approach was exclusively street art. I met Eva a year later.
Eva: I thought I wouldn't be able to paint in the street like I do in a studio, because I can spend days on a single canvas. I paint realistic figures in black and white with acrylics, with lots of drips and a long drying time. Since I go back to it several times, it can't be as impulsive as a graffiti gesture. My tools being the brush and patience, I didn't consider being able to paint furtively. He then told me I should just do it on paper. That's how we started pasting up our work. In 2007, in Lyon, there weren't many people putting up posters. So we had fun putting them up on trucks or high up.
JUTTABLED STYLES
Your work is first and foremost noticeable for its very strong juxtaposition of your different worlds.
Sir: Our first works were done separately, on different canvases. We weren't yet Evazésir. It took four to five years for pieces to gradually appear in which we each placed a character and mixed our techniques to arrive at this mix between stencil and painting that we now sign only as a duo.
Eva: No Rules Corp included members who made music, DJed, did stencil work, graffiti, and realistic painting. We wanted to collaborate, and the connections came through the form. He started creating the backgrounds, I would work on them, and then he would work on them again. Our worlds are like yin and yang. They fit together perfectly; one cannot exist without the other, like superimposed layers: if one is alone, the other is missing.
This juxtaposition of styles is expressed both through the dynamic of figuration/abstraction and through the opposition of black and white/colour.
Eva: We are always creating stories and characters. He is very much into color, antique patterns, and old papers that form a universe. For his studio pieces, we find old furniture in the street, which he dismantles and juxtaposes to give it a new life. I then intervene with a character who might have lived in that context. Our works thus occupy the beginning and end of the same story, reflecting a thought process developed together.
Sir: We like our characters to be in black and white. For us, it's about getting to the heart of the matter: we don't always see the point in having color in our work.
Eva: This creates both a contrast and an attraction. We then tend towards the old, the vintage image, or the slightly blurry film. Our paintings do not depict modernism. Many terms are often used to describe it, including vintage, Sometimes old-fashioned. But for us, black and white plays a full part in the search for the trace and the story that we are going to tell.
Sir: We can appreciate this modernity in other artists, but it frightens us a little: that's why there are almost never any contemporary characters in our plays.
The assembly of disparate elements is often central to the work.
Eva: There's a certain haphazard quality to the assemblage: it's sometimes described as a monochrome, a mosaic, or a puzzle. It's about trying to find coherence from elements that weren't meant to be put together. This creates a link that might seem absurd at first: a chair leg and the image of a grandfather evoke the grandfather's chair. Yet, it's simply a matter of observation and a piece of furniture. It's about mental connections.
Sir: All the elements vary, whether in terms of their time period or their origin. Modern civilizations are cosmopolitan. Our dream is to create unity from this diversity, which will nourish our stories. We talk a lot to offer works that people can interpret and make their own. We always have our message, but we appreciate that the work can be seen differently. These other interpretations are sometimes superb and highlight things we hadn't considered. We've been working this way since a piece we created in Montreuil that depicted a migrant: people told us it was very beautiful but that it was a little difficult to see every day.
Eva: We will always have our narrative and our story, and we will never produce a production. simply Aesthetically, because it will have no interest. This meaning will only sometimes be hinted at in the title.
Do you have a particular relationship with the gaze, which is often a key part of your paintings, whether it is the only element present or, on the contrary, the only missing part?
Eva: The gaze is perhaps the central theme of our painting. It's the mirror of the soul: by seeing a gaze, we understand what lies behind it. Everything passes through it, thought as well as personality. Sometimes, simply including a gaze in a painting is enough to fully convey what we want to say about a character. I don't know what we would do without it.
Sir: In this age of communication, we often dare to discuss many things without truly meaning them. Yet, it's difficult to deceive with a look. When we search for our subjects on old postcards, it sometimes stops us in our tracks. It can unsettle us, even make us question ourselves. Zapata, for example, has a very harsh gaze: in this image, I felt as if he were staring at me, asking if I was certain I was living on the right path.
Eva: There are some murals that make me uncomfortable because the gaze questions or makes me doubt.
Sir: The most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, It is based on observation. In the absence of a common language, communication also takes place through this. Even though during our travels in Latin America or Indonesia, it was also through painting that we were able to communicate in a different way.
Eva: There's also something universal about the gaze. Everyone can recognize themselves in it or understand it. By painting a character with a particular gaze, it resonates with others, allowing them to understand the painting. Whether in Mexico or Indonesia, it draws people in.
Your murals also play a lot on the effects of visual tearing, deconstruction/reconstruction.
Eva: Showing the wear and tear of time and the street gives temporality to matter. The tear signifies that there is a layer on top of another, something hidden, time past. It also highlights our problem with flatness, smoothness, and emptiness. We play with different depths, with what is revealed and what is concealed, hiding certain parts to better reveal others.
Sir: It's a game between what we show on the surface and what lies beneath. We're never disappointed when one of our collages is torn down because it proves there's been interaction. It's almost sad when nothing happens and it slowly falls apart. It's awful to see that.
Eva: We're moving beyond the classic, flat dimensions of the original surface. Even on a wall, we'll want to create volume. If we get permission, we'll be the first to drill, hole, and assemble old pieces of wood found in the street. For the walls in Nancy and Epinal, we were able to collect objects from the city's recycling center, drawing on the residents to piece together a story connected to their past.
A MEMORY OF THE INTIMATE
What sources do you use?
Eva: We do a lot of documentary research. To work on the Paris Commune, we scanned the few available materials, which allowed us to start with real people. We recontextualize them in a new world, in a new period, bringing them back to life. This creates a parallel, using the reality of the sources in the same way we might use an old drawer as a support. It's exciting to find old sources to create new imaginaries. In fact, we love hunting for bargains, and if we find old postcards, we buy the lot without hesitation, knowing that it will inevitably contain some people to bring back to life.
Sir: By inventing the rest of their story, we become archaeologists. It's a very important part of the work that we love. For example, it was the theme of our exhibition on ordinary people. Starting with an old notebook found in the street, we took all the photos of people and turned them into paintings. But was it really an existing family? Someone could have come along and seen the image of their ancestors appear before them.
Eva: Except that we will have brought them back to life by imagining what their story might have been at a given time. Each time, we start with a discovery or research about a place. Thanks to the internet, our paintings are then enriched with sources and anecdotes.
Urban artists who use ancient iconography often do so as is, subverting it. Here, there is transformation and reinterpretation.
Eva: The entire history of our frescoes and paintings initially depends on the backgrounds and contexts. It's the recontextualization of a figure with a source, which can sometimes be a place or an old object. There's a fresco in Alesia called Waiting, hope and doubt, located in front of a hospital. Our story revolves around a person waiting to hear how a loved one is doing inside the building. Everything here was built around the location, seeking out images of people who lived there at the time of its construction. Imagining the loss of a loved one during that era allowed us to illustrate that period. Even though our creative process doesn't involve denunciation, we sometimes feel the need to convey a message. Thus, the artwork on Rue des Cascades deals with tax havens. It was the title that allowed its meaning to be discerned: Insulting People.
Sir: When painting in the street, you know you have an audience, and you'd find it a shame if a mural contained neither a story nor a message. Here, the message remained discreet, which led some to believe the figures were Jewish. This is interesting because the purpose of this art is not the finished mural, but rather this moment of dialogue, where you put down your brushes to talk with those who come to ask you questions.
Through these stories you develop a true memory of intimacy.
Eva: We always talk about anonymous people, ordinary people, most often from the time of the Commune, the 1930s, or the 1950s. In a rare exception, we discovered that the gallery where we were exhibiting had originally been a cabaret. We wanted to present a painting evoking the place, and that's how we came to include Patachou, a singer with a fascinating story who wrote songs for Jacques Brel and gave Georges Brassens his start.
Some works thus make reference to particular periods, such as the interwar period.
Eva: I love historical painting, genre scenes. Why is it that in contemporary art we no longer work with history? In previous centuries, it occupied a prominent place, along with portraiture and religious painting. I have the impression that with our paintings dealing with the 20th century...e On our small scale, we create historical paintings to bring them back into the spotlight.
RECLAIM THE STREET
You collect raw materials from the street. How do you use them?
Sir: It's very rare that we simply take an element and paint over it. Each time, we break it down to create new assemblages. It started in Montreuil, when we sometimes searched for old furniture for ourselves among the discarded items in Vincennes. There's a kind of nostalgia for these objects, with which a person had to live for years, that are now outside, like the old wooden doors from our grandmothers' houses. A moment has passed, which we assemble with other elements to reconstruct a memory from the fragmented memory of this multitude of recollections.
Eva: From then on, we stopped working on canvas because it had become impossible. Preserving this memory of the object is a process similar to that of a photo album: we like to look back at what happened Before. I can't work on a sterile, blank canvas. The more deteriorated and old a wall is, the more history it has, and the more one wants to invest in it.
Sir: In Indonesia, someone asked us to paint a beautiful wall because it was badly damaged. While we were working, he was applying a coat of white paint so we could paint over it. He didn't understand our approach. But it's precisely these effects of time on walls that we love.
Eva: Repainting it white would erase the place's history. We want to let the materials speak for themselves.
Sir: We build a background from these pieces of wood gathered from all over. Each piece represents a memory. We paint a face on it. If we remove a piece—a memory—the image will no longer be whole, like an identity composed of all these pieces of wood that would become unsteady if we lost one. I think we cherish memory, remembrance, what must not be forgotten.
Eva: In art, one must distinguish between the support, the form, and the color, but here it's not just about supports. It's about giving the object a new life, thinking about the life that could be built around it. The material is a foundation from which a work of imagination will emerge. Fragmentation, for its part, allows it to have a new story.
This fragmented memory therefore also passes through the object.
Eva: There is an explosion of form, a dematerialization, a decontextualization: renewal thus comes from taking a piece from a drawer, a cupboard, a character. A new life arises from this transformation, because if one merely reuses, the creation will have no interest.
Sir: We truly live by the expression: "Nothing is lost, everything is transformed." As soon as we cut a piece of wood, we keep the remaining pieces in a box, sometimes for five years or three moves before we know how to use them, because we can't bring ourselves to throw them away.
Recovering also means not producing more.
Sir: Recycling also embodies the idea of making do with what we already have. There are far too many things on our planet, so rather than adding to the pile of objects, it's better to rummage through them and use what we have to rebuild, in a spirit of degrowth. For example, we rarely go to art supply stores, reusing half-empty pots for a wall. Many people need to buy things to feel happy, to feel alive. For us, it's when we find something.
Eva: We consume and buy very little, and our paintings reflect that. Reusing instead of throwing things away is second nature to us. We're thrilled on bulky waste collection day, or when we find a roll of wallpaper that's thirty or forty years old. This connection to finding and reclaiming materials also drives us.
ON URBAN ART
In what way is the street a unique space for creation?
Eva: Above all, it offers accessibility. With COVID-19, no cultural venues are open, and if there's one place where art can survive, it's in the street. The walls allow people to express themselves and show things, to dream, or to escape.
Sir: It's a saying: "White walls, silent people." It's important to paint on them because they are surfaces, blank canvases. A damaged wall is more inspiring because, repainted white, it erases part of its history. The street is a place of memory and history, particularly through street names, statues, and monuments.
Eva: Today, our illegal practice involves collage, while the legal one involves painting. An authorized mural allows us to spend hours on the same wall, while retaining our basic medium, even if we use tearing effects that can visually resemble collage.
What is your relationship with photography?
Eva: First and foremost, we like the location. We don't think about the photography or the framing we might do later. That's not a thought that accompanies us when we think about our murals.
Sir: Our target audience is passersby rather than internet users or photographers. Our initial idea was to engage people. Photography doesn't interest us, and after painting, we want to move on. This work on social media is a burden for us; we only do it because we have to. But if we could free ourselves from it, we would stop immediately.
Social media has led to a proliferation of recognition scales.
Sir: When we started in Paris, Facebook was just getting started, and you could easily know everyone. Now that it's possible to see what's happening in other countries, it's created new ways to showcase your work, broadening your reach. But what initially interested me about graffiti and street art was offering someone an image on their way to work, to engage them, make them think, or convey a message they wouldn't otherwise have seen. It raises the question of why we create in the street.
Eva: The street artist who's just starting out now has their Instagram account, their brush, and their paints. The street offers some a platform for promotion, which makes it a good place to paint. Then there are the 2.0 artists who only share their work through their phone screens. Fame today is built through likes, and the street is now largely confined to Instagram. It's a shift in mentality.
Sir: Things have changed a lot with the internet. Initially, you had to go out into the street for people to discover your work. But today, it's possible to create magnificent murals in inaccessible places, and then share them. It's sometimes said that it's better to be a good communicator and a bad artist than the other way around. That's why some people compare street art to advertising.
Do you consider Street art to be an artistic movement?
Sir: This is a complicated question because not everyone has the same definition of the word "street art." We like to say we do urban art, which encompasses street art beyond painting. Furthermore, in my opinion, street art includes a multitude of styles, from Cubism to more realistic works, which makes it more of a medium. This label emphasizes working in the street at the expense of the quality of the work produced. I prefer the idea of interdisciplinary approaches, and the possibility for people who didn't create in the street to come and place magnificent pieces there, without necessarily using spray paint.
Eva: We are visual artists and we create murals and installations. It's part of contemporary art. Currently, what we see in urban art galleries reminds me of a trendy artistic movement, like Pop art. You could almost call it a fashion. While it has different branches, its defining characteristic is that it leads its practitioners to work across various mediums, both in the studio and on the street.
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