THE CYKLOP
THE CYKLOP – BOLES TO EAGERLY ATTACK PASSERSBY
February 2019 – 1793 words
BIRTH OF THE CYKLOPS
How did you become an urban artist?
I never stopped drawing. As a kid, I tinkered in the street, creating lettering and stencils. I also decided to pursue a career I loved, working partly as a graphic designer, visual artist, and painter. In the early 2000s, when street art began to explode, I worked for a press agency, managing the culture pages and studying the streets extensively to take photos, much like today's bloggers.
I wanted to leave my mark by setting myself apart and breaking free from traditional mediums like paper, canvas, or walls. So I (re)appropriated the bollard. It's an approach I could have taken in a playful way, simply drawing an eye with a marker, but I used techniques like stenciling on a round shape, allowing me to work quickly without necessarily needing permission. The transition was thus made smoothly between my profession as a graphic designer, who always has to defend their work to clients, and that of an artist, who does what they want and is the one people come to see.
For many street artists, there's an approach that aims to show their paintings to the widest possible audience, to be as visible as possible. I wanted to bring a touch of whimsy and work in the backstreets. Sometimes the idea of painting illegally at night feels a bit daunting, but that's not my lifestyle, and I prefer to create in a more comfortable way.
The first thing that stands out in the use of the bollard is the direct use of an element of urban context as a support for creation.
I didn't do this with the initial intention of creating street art. In my opinion, street art can be legal or illegal, paid or free, indoors or outdoors. The essential element is contextualization. Indeed, we don't work on a neutral surface, nor on a blank sheet of paper, but rather we intervene in a three-dimensional space that pre-exists with an already defined meaning, to which we simply add something. This addition is made by repurposing or using the street's materials to create meaning within the artwork. Sometimes, simply placing the artwork in the street allows it to resonate. When Banksy paints a Syrian refugee with the features of Steve Jobs in Calais, or a life-size engraving of Les Misérables in front of the French embassy in London while there are riots in the country, it has meaning.
WHAT IS A CYKLOP?
In your work, contextualization occurs de facto because the medium of creation is an urban element. The bollard is an invisible object that you make visible again.
We wanted to erase these bollards by painting them with this specific shade of brown. Painting life-size is about adding characters to the street, and I often use the example of animals. If you paint a small tiger in the middle of a wall, no matter how beautiful your stencil is, it won't have any particular reason to be there rather than somewhere else. But if you paint that same tiger at ground level and life-size, the connection people make between your painting and the street will be much stronger: it's as if you've added a tiger roaming free in the street. Someone had created greyhounds along the Canal Saint-Martin, using scraps of faux fur that, once pieced together, evoked a pack of dogs. It's also to achieve this dimension and give meaning to what I wanted to do in the street that I chose to work on a pre-existing surface.
The eye is thus the central element of your work, accentuating its interactive dimension, which makes children the first viewers.
Initially, it was a somewhat anecdotal discovery. Picasso said that his work with a bicycle seat was the result of chance. You try things out and eventually find that element that works. The eye is the first thing we use to communicate with people, expressing our feelings. We see everything with it, but the gaze is reciprocal: I see you as you see me. It's anthropomorphism; the post is humanized by this presence.
Since the bollard is immovable, I also try to play as much as possible with contextual elements: for example, I mounted an exhibition for which a bollard, torn from the ground, looked from inside the gallery towards the street at the post attached in front of it. There's a gaze between the two that makes you, in the end, no longer know which one is truly free: the one attached outside or the one detached inside?
It's true that my work is geared towards children, and I do a lot of workshops with them. I transform these bollards into toys, based on mythology, the story of Ulysses and the Cyclops: the dripping eye is a gouged-out eye, and with my dartboard, you even throw darts for that purpose. Giving it an interactive dimension, trying to create things that can be experienced or used, allows people to reconnect with these characters.
It also has an educational dimension, especially when you revisit the works of Montmartre painters.
In Montmartre, I was looking to create subtle allusions, to play on semantic contextualization. I wanted to work with the local painters, and when I did some iconographic research on these artists, I realized they all had the same look. So I chose to represent their portraits in their own style. It's my Sagrada Família, a project that never ends. I now have a commission to paint the other half of the street. I work in the summer, when the weather is nice: it's a far cry from illegal street art, sitting on crates with acrylic paint. In this way, I'm completely reclaiming the street.
Your creative technique is indeed very different from Graffiti…
There's a huge difference between graffiti and street art. They represent two eras, two cultures that tend to blend together today. In France, Zloty was the first to work with spray paint, creating his irradiated characters as early as the 1960s. Spray paint cans, which appeared in the 1950s, were designed for repainting vehicles and therefore conceived more for technological than artistic purposes. American graffiti artists used them as a means of asserting their identity, which was part of hip-hop culture. In France, during the same period, stenciling was already established with artists like Miss.Tic, Jef Aérosol, and Blek le Rat, and an alternative, punk style of painting emerged with the Ripoulin Brothers, the VLP (Victims of the Liberation Movement), and the artists of the new Figuration Libre movement. But the boundaries of the medium were already fluid, and Mesnager and the VLP didn't work with spray paint, while the stencil artists who did came more from a rock culture.
CYKLOPS IN THE HEART OF THE CITY
By transforming bollards into characters, you turn the street into a theatre.
The bollards allow for a kind of staging, as at Versailles where the history of France is recounted in the very streets where it was written, through figures like Madame de Pompadour, who selected prostitutes for Louis XV, or Louise Michel, who was tried there. They thus attempt to tell a story for the people who stroll through the area. Another example is a painting I did in the 18th century.e In the 16th arrondissement of Paris, Marcel Duchamp drew a goatee on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, at a time when people were beginning to discuss Leonardo da Vinci's homosexuality after Freud addressed it in an essay. Duchamp seized upon this to write that she had a "hot ass," which could almost be considered homophobic today. But he himself was cross-dressing as Rrose Sélavy… For me, creating this painting on Rue Piémontési, at the intersection with Rue André-Antoine where transvestites worked, is also a nod to the neighborhood.
What continuity is there between the post outside and inside the workshop? How can its purpose be preserved?
Painting the bollard in the studio is a way of appropriating it, of taming a wild element. I thus enter into the system of ownership through the sale of an object. Working in the studio also allows for a more refined painting process. In the case of the installation in Versailles, you have to imagine that these bollards were delivered to me and that they were replanted after being painted. For the others, they are bollards found in the street, hit by a truck, or fallen over: I give them an AOC (Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée) to indicate the street and the location of their discovery.
What is your perspective on the ephemeral nature of your work, given that the bollard object is relatively permanent within the urban space?
Of course, it's flattering to the ego to rediscover one's work long afterward. But sometimes it's surprising to find that only the signature remains on the ground, or to find a battered bollard that was installed eight or ten years ago. I remember a pedestrian crossing where the eye painting had seen better days, worn away by the marks of people who had touched it. I like to feel the paint, but in museums, as soon as you get near a canvas, the alarm goes off. Seeing one of your creations damaged because people have touched it is fantastic!
A CYKLOP IN CONTEMPORARY ART
How has Street Art revolutionized Contemporary Art?
Street art reflects two things that didn't exist before and that have revolutionized the traditional art world: social media and working in the street. Previously, artists worked in their studios and met their audience on opening nights or during open studio events, most often through a gallery. Today, it's possible to speak directly to an audience, and what's more, without being part of the art establishment: three-quarters of street artists haven't attended art school.
In a way, street art functions like a popular referendum: everyone has the power to express themselves. The cards have been completely reshuffled compared to the number of artists who could hope to break through thirty years ago without having attended art school. Everyone can be an enthusiast or simply an observer. Moreover, the work of analysis and documentation now lies more in the hands of citizens than in those of journalists, and the opportunity to build a collection no longer belongs to a select few.
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