JEAN FAUCHEUR

JEAN FAUCHEUR – TWENTY TIMES ON THE WORK PUT BACK TO THE WORK

October 2018 – 3135 words

FIRST URBAN STEPS

Can you talk about your first steps as an urban artist, and how you gradually became established within the city, while making your work visible?

This needs to be contextualized. Today, with the internet, it's possible to disseminate work widely and instantly. But in the 1980s, these possibilities were limited for an artist, and the usual route most often involved museums or galleries. My interest in urban art stemmed from the fact that it allowed for direct communication with the public, a face-to-face encounter. That's what I missed in galleries—I'd already had a few exhibitions—in a space that felt somewhat sterile.

I adopted a gradual, snail-like approach, starting in Versailles and heading towards the center of Paris, beginning slowly and modestly to subvert my fears. At the time, Les Halles was already under construction; it was a bustling area with lots of billboards and foot traffic. This objective allowed me to refine techniques for displaying fairly large and dramatic paintings, because when there are a dozen posters to put up, it requires rapid production. Yet I didn't think it would lead anywhere: sometimes things are set in motion by venturing into the unknown.

At that time, the other option for people who couldn't afford to exhibit in galleries was media exposure: a few leading figures like Mesnager and Speedy Graphito brought to light all these new street artists who weren't yet part of the contemporary art scene. The concept of Street Art didn't exist; the artists were grouped under the label "Young Painters." Following an exhibition in Rennes, the term "Media Painters" also emerged, referring to the use of the street as a medium between the artist and the public, but also because it was one of the only ways to gain recognition.

From your very first poster, Rent Granada!, an interaction is created between the painting and the context by revealing the advertising slogan.

Rent Granada! It was a happy accident. At the time, I had a tiny, narrow studio with a ceiling barely two meters high. Art is sometimes born of constraint only to die in freedom. When I painted, I always had to work with part of the surface on the floor. Advertisers usually place their slogans as high as possible, which allowed them to show through by pasting my own posters over them. This was an interesting process because it offered an escape from standardized advertising. I would arrive with raw, very simple paintings, sometimes including my phone number. There was a disconnect between the advertising medium and these paintings, which had nothing to sell.

How did the Ripoulin Brothers collective fit into the period of artistic effervescence of the 80s?

Without the internet, opportunities to meet were very random. However, there are circumstances, chance encounters, that allow people who want to go somewhere, without really knowing where, to meet, creating a convergence of energies. For me, this chance encounter came from discovering a reproduction of a Keith Haring work. What interested me was getting off the beaten path: and when people are in that phase, they always end up meeting. Thanks to sending a portfolio to a friend living in New York, I was invited to discover this city and this scene where everything was just beginning to take shape, centered around a few major figures like Basquiat and Keith Haring.

I didn't have a strategy. It was around this time that I met the Ripoulin brothers, who sent me photographs of their work in Paris. I showed them myself to Shafrazi, who came to France and decided to organize an exhibition for January of the following year! Some of us had never exhibited before and started in New York, before the group exploded onto the scene a year later. The beauty of it all came from that effervescence. Today, you can have a marketing vision, plan for the longer term, but back then, it had to happen, even if it meant everything stopped two or three years later. 

I was very surprised when I met Thom Thom in Oberkampf in the early 2000s to realize he knew my name. It was the early days of the internet, and a book by Denys Riout offered a fairly broad overview of the French urban art scene. This book became a reference and helped this story to develop over time.

It is difficult for an urban artist to find a form that emerges, integrates and blends into the street at the same time, in a contextual dimension.

With my work on posters, the frame already referenced the painting, so the rest of the environment wasn't all that important. What matters for an advertisement is the number of people who will see it, not its context. Street art has played much more on this dimension, because when you paint directly on a wall, you have to take into account what's happening around you. The interest comes from working with the environment, its irregularities and spaces, which makes it very complex. I simplified this problem by moving away from the wall, and if I'm asked to paint outdoors today, I have more difficulty because I don't have that feel for it, unlike an artist like OX who, for me, achieves the perfect link between my work and a purely contextual piece. His approach, magnificent and intelligent, represents, in a way, the essence of urban art.

A CREATION IN PERPETUAL CHANGE

The space occupied by the workshop is very important in your work.

I have a fairly traditional artistic background: I enjoy the quiet work of the studio. I've done very little work outdoors, never any wild painting. When I wanted to create something outside, I tried to connect the studio with the street, which led me to find forms suited to the scale of the city, strong visual impressions that transformed my work. The idea was to avoid spending two weeks on a painting that could disappear after twenty-four hours.

Your career challenges the image of an artist confined to a single motif, working in cycles and without a defined form.

Today, if an artist doesn't have a strong visual identity, they go unseen, unrecognized, and unexhibited. This is a real problem, often confining artists to a single style, especially in the street art scene, which imposes several constraints: the need to act quickly and with a very distinctive style. This doesn't allow for significant evolution over time, and many artists find themselves unable to develop their work once they've been identified by a particular motif.

For my part, I followed my deepest desire, which was to go wherever I wanted. I studied mural art so that no one would tell me what to do. There were obviously temptations to settle on a particular style, but in developing this way of working, there's always a point where the urge to change becomes too strong: in a series of sculptures, when I've just completed three or four that interest me because they're complete, I could continue them indefinitely. So I'll look elsewhere, towards painting or photography. Not being where you're expected is also a kind of subversion in this field.

Although the form has constantly evolved, your interest in faces or the human body has remained constant.

But humanity itself hasn't changed; its inner struggles remain. Spiritual traditions say that the journey is more important than the destination. Ultimately, the human body or the face are well-worn subjects that many artists have explored. However, one can say things that transcend this universal theme. To represent a body or a head is to speak of humanity, of energy. Even without a physical body, we are still talking about these things.

A few years ago, I made a series of still videos, with no one in the camera's frame, only nature in motion. But even so, the film speaks of what lies behind it. It's the same with painting or sculpture: the stakes lie elsewhere than in the object represented. This is why I don't sacralize the art object, which has something futile about it. The space in which this object exists, as well as its spiritual dimension, interest me, but that has nothing to do with the object itself. I could create a dancer's gesture that would become a work of art, but what would remain of it afterward? After a piece of Bach, nothing remains. In this respect, dance and music give a good idea of what ephemeral art is.

During your creative cycles, you oscillate between highly accomplished plastic forms and the desire for a systematic return to drawing, with a need to produce a lot and spontaneously.

Tony Shafrazi called this desire to produce a great deal "Productive Rebellion." This idea is interesting in relation to the street, because it suggests a revolt that both proposes and produces. We are trapped daily in this structure where we die if we stop working. We constantly wonder what would happen if we ceased to produce. It's a problematic personal psychological structure. A few years ago, I began a process of reflection on this, realizing that in the studio the body ceased to exist, that one could spend ten hours there only to emerge crippled with pain. This raises questions about what it means to be an artist, and the moment when one ceases to be one.

You talk a lot about Cubism.

Cubism was one of the dead ends I explored. When Shafrazi suggested we continue our collaboration, I realized I'd moved too quickly in my approach to arrive at the very defined style I had. So I looked into art history and turned to Cubism, which, for me, represented the birth of the French spirit. At a time when I was wondering whether to stay in the United States to become more American, I wanted to see what I could find in those roots.

However, it is possible to ask what remained to be explored by cubism.

This approach was necessary on a personal level. Cubism is a form, but it's also a state of mind, an inner construction. I knew I was going to face unpleasant comments, especially since I was engaging with them head-on. I wasn't mocking them. I granted myself this freedom, even though one might think there's no point in committing to a path after having followed prestigious figures like Braque or Picasso. Being an artist means having this incredible freedom to pursue what you feel. I often tell people that if I'm here today, it's because I was here yesterday, there the day before yesterday, and if I hadn't been there, I wouldn't be here today with my mistakes and my intuitions. Questioning these phases is wanting to question who I am, but it's futile to try to do that.

THE STREET IS A BREEDING GROUND: THE ORIGINS OF THE WALL.

With the MUR, your approach is part of a global creation, serving the collective.

My interest in collectives in the broadest sense began with the Ripoulin group in the 1980s. But it was with Le MUR and other events organized around the same time that they started to take on a more prominent role. With a few friends, we are currently founding an urban art federation, and this is yet another collective adventure. This openness over the past ten years has led me to broaden my perspective and ask new questions.

The street is a breeding ground for artists.

When we see that Pierre Huyghe is in the Top 10 of contemporary French artists today, we have to recognize this evolution. In the early 2000s, I told people to pay attention to what was happening in the street because these artists would end up in museums ten to fifteen years later. They are often people who aren't interested in the art world as it is, who want to find other forms of expression and take risks. Urban art thus offers a breeding ground for the art of the future. However, not everything is interesting, and just because you create in the street doesn't mean you'll be the next Picasso, but the qualities developed include a certain generosity, energy, and a fighting spirit. This creates interesting and original career paths.

What is the distinguishing characteristic of Urban Art compared to Contemporary Art?

The development of urban art was hampered by the rejection of this new form by contemporary art. Street art developed despite institutions, the police, and public mistrust. It found self-sustaining economies and pioneering modes of distribution, with sites like «"ARMVR"» who were showcasing graffiti online as early as the beginning of the 2000s. Gradually, institutions began to take an interest in this movement, wondering how we had done it. If it was able to work, it was precisely because they weren't interested. At one time, selling T-shirts and merchandise allowed some to survive while waiting to sell their paintings.

What did you mean by comparing the city to a 62-square chessboard?

The city is a kind of chess game. I had run into Joël Lautier at the Café Charbon, and had asked him a question which was essentially: «"What is your favorite position?"» He had given me a small problem, which, like all chess problems, is almost akin to a romantic relationship. We have intuitions during a game and often find the right moves when we play them. The same is true of an artist's work: intuitions that lead to dead ends, that pull us back to allow us to move on to something else.

REFLECTIONS ON THE WORK AND THE ARTISTIC APPROACH

In the book So far, so good, You poetically evoke the ephemeral nature of the work, which would be the idea of «"to produce and waste"». Creating in the street is like creating at a loss, but creating nonetheless.

Urban art is unique in that it produces works and forms known to have planned obsolescence. One must mourn their loss, which can seem a little strange at first, before becoming a psychological pattern: it then becomes odd that the artwork isn't destroyed. Nostalgia cannot exist, or is expressed only through photography. This has greatly influenced my work and my relationship to the world. Indeed, the art world is a world of conservation and protection. When we have works in a French museum, we know they will be very well preserved. This sacralization is quite strange, especially when the works are in public spaces. If the Mona Lisa were put in a cellar for fifty years and allowed to disappear, what would happen? The fact that these paintings are ephemeral, in my opinion, allows us to put this into perspective.

The work would only exist to be shown…

The problem with this idea is that if a work of art only exists because it is exhibited, then we are simultaneously denying the existence of all those works that are not exhibited, because they were made by artists less well-known or less talented than Leonardo da Vinci. I believe that works of art have a mysterious way of acting, a mystery of which we only perceive the surface. But they continue to act even after they are destroyed.

The fact that research takes precedence over the materialization of the finished work places you in a very contextual approach.

There's been a tendency around conceptual art for a number of years now, which tends to prioritize the concept over the object. Take the Pierre Huyghe retrospective, for example: it was interesting to rediscover the man I had known twenty years earlier. In a way, the feeling you got upon entering the exhibition was almost visceral. Conversely, urban art is about doing before thinking, like a response to conceptual art: creating first, then reflecting.

You also say: «"I realized that the artistic process stems from both confinement and openness."»

It's a glorious confinement because it produces objects and forms that others can admire, but what becomes of the artist in all of this? People dream of being one, but I advise against it because when you realize you're just as confined as anywhere else, it's a real existential shock that requires healing. It's difficult to break free from this process, and this explains, in particular, the difficulty artists have in engaging in psychoanalysis. Isn't there a way to consider Art for something other than solving problems? When you delve into the depths of your being, you can produce things that are interesting, but on a broader, more difficult-to-define plane.

This question of identification with a specific form, and the perverse effects that this can generate, is at the heart of the work of many urban artists.

The studio is the artist's cursed space, just as the street is the urban artist's. Nevertheless, the latter also has a studio, a place where they can experiment. Yet, experimentation is dangerous, because sometimes interesting results are obtained, but for various reasons, they are unshowable. I share my studio with Seth, and for the past six months, I've seen some of his creations taking darker turns. When dealers discover his work, I don't know how they'll react. But he's searching for something he doesn't express in the street. I think that for urban artists, this back-and-forth is truly valuable and allows them to question these forms. Indeed, when they reach a point of completeness in their work, they ask themselves questions, want to enrich and update it, but this is difficult.

Few of them play with identity. Artists seek it out and are identified immediately, especially through social media. There's no mystery.

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