Thom Thom
THE CUT-OUT POSTER OR TIME REGAINED
COURSE
How did you become an artist? When did you start out busking?
I have a problem with the word artist, which for me belongs to the previous generation, for better with Miss.Tic who presents herself as an artist "pure and simple", not just "urban", for worse with hypocritical people reproducing a bourgeois-artist model inherited from the 19the century. I nevertheless prefer the term urban artist to street artist, even though initially I was mainly interested in the execution. My first striking memory is a David Bowie music video, China Girl, composed of video effects and overlays that are always present in my work. I was excited by this experimental visual language found in opening credits, music videos, and certain dream sequences, made up of additions, multiplications, and split screen and dissolves. That's why I studied filmmaking at the Louis Lumière School. But after graduating, I quickly realized that a film is more about "producing" than "making." The director is just one link in the chain, and while they might be called an auteur, they have nothing to do with the actual creative process. They aren't necessarily people with a message to convey or a strong ideology.
During my very first intervention, I was seventeen. I got caught by a cop who told me not to give in to conformity. I reflected on this for about ten years, eventually finding myself doing things that were more about subverting or defacing pre-existing media, which gives my work a meta-media aspect. Cutting up advertising posters became a way of transposing this thwarted desire: I had only recently started putting up posters when I realized the next day that people had cleverly removed what I had done, using a chair to access it. I never met these people, but I realized that the street is a place where every action elicits either indifference or a challenge, a chain reaction. There's a magical dimension to the performative function of graffiti and wall inscriptions. It is at once something very new and contemporary, almost futuristic, but also a primitive act that gradually fades away: Jacques Villeglé presents a similar reflection with his socio-political alphabet.
I've always wanted to create works of art, to produce things. During my studies, I realized that this would involve objects capable of lasting for centuries without difficulty, but very delicate and complicated to handle. Even the transition between different mediums is destructive: I saw China Girl live on a broadcast channel, recorded on VHS. I'll never recapture that quality in my life, because while the colors are a bit more vibrant, a certain subtlety has been obliterated by digital technology. Moreover, a reel of film or a hard drive has no appeal, whereas a canvas is a finished product that one can admire, even if it remains fragile. Whereas when I see my paper aging, I know it will outlive us, that even if the colors fade, the form will remain. That's the challenge for me: to make objects whose function is to outlive us, otherwise we're a bit like frauds.
THE POSTER, A CUP GROUND
Were you initially interested in the poster as a support or medium?
I was already carrying a box cutter around, cutting up National Front posters. I had no other thought than this act of destruction: in fact, in my early days, I initially considered sticking the elements representing my logo (created in my final year of high school with my friend Antoine, depicting a T and an A intertwined), in a rather self-centered approach. When I cut it, I traced a triangle through the layers, which fell away like confetti: I had discovered a new technique. The people around me encouraged me to continue. I'm interested in the poster as a medium and a support: it's a multimedia object, layered on top of each other. My most interesting works are indeed those that allow us to go back in time over two or three months. Through this contemporary archaeology, we notice the coherence in the color palette and the tendencies regarding image saturation.
The segmentation also necessitates a slower pace of action in the street.
Even though I don't always manage to stick to it, I try to spend the first hour coring, that is, cutting out the least interesting parts of the poster, in order to learn about the layers underneath. People who pass me during this stage, when there's nothing to see, either leave me alone or think I'm crazy because they don't understand what I'm doing. I leave no trace, no paper falls, because I put everything in my pockets. This allows me, when I go to throw everything away, to take a step back and reflect as I cross the street. So, I can't complete a four-by-three meter poster in less than two or three days. The poster has to remain unchanged during this period, even though it will only stay up for a few days before being covered over again. A certain logic then takes hold, because in the same spot, I can find the previously made cutouts to incorporate them into the next piece. But the best things I can do outdoors reach a degree of fragility that makes any cutting difficult.
Does your working method rely on a random element?
It's exactly like improvisation in jazz. There's a score I know that allows me to explore certain directions. I'm very methodical: I don't touch the eyes, the mouth, or the nose, preferring frontal images because the brain can't handle the information overload of a profile photograph. I've removed the eyes once or twice, but then it's no longer a face, but rather a mask. My compositions are based on mirroring, reflection, and symmetry, which allows me to invite the viewer to interpret, because ultimately, what I'm manipulating is the viewer's eye. Through this process, I try to remove as much as possible while maintaining a balance. Removing too little creates a scaly effect, similar to stenciling. It's not bad, but if the cutout is smaller than the eye, the brain will start to see a pattern similar to snakeskin. Conversely, removing a larger piece plays on the effect of tattooing and scarification: by symmetrizing the cutout, we give the brain a clue to interpretation, making it unable to determine which layer is above and which is below. This is also why people, watching me work, think I'm doing collage. If the lower layer is red, our mind will think it's makeup. It's a form of Gestalt, something our mind will try to synthesize to recreate these artificial, mask-like makeup effects, with the image underneath projected onto the face.
Does talking about a similar palette mean that your piece is composed with the different colors in mind, or are they fragmented?
The exact shade doesn't matter much to me, although it's important that I can rely on strong saturations like Heineken green, orange juice yellow, or red. Without them, I'll throw the poster away, unless it's an incredible subject. Once the cutout is done, I have a one in ten chance of achieving a magnificent color: I once got a pink so vibrant that I had to work exclusively with it, but that's very rare. Most of the time, I then start making smaller cutouts within the first ones, trying to recreate the facial features, especially the cutouts around the cheekbones. I'm very interested in the work of stencil artists to see how they solve this problem: C215 creates a kind of S-shaped zoning to try to confuse the eye and prevent it from drawing the viewer's attention. By blurring these areas with small cutouts or fine spray lines, he prefers to avoid conveying any specific intention, reserving it for hair, fur, and wrinkles. Conversely, I'm a bit closer to the artist-craftsman approach, which sometimes employs more angular techniques. This raises the question of whether one can treat it as if it were a stained-glass window.
How do you remove the posters from the street?
It's difficult now because there are fewer and fewer billboards, they're smaller and less accessible. Big budgets have turned away from them. Ninety percent of the time I tear down H&M posters in the metro. I've found several techniques, but it's awful because the tearing makes a sinister noise that creates a heavy atmosphere in the station. People are also often afraid I'll fall onto the tracks. Once, at Opéra, I didn't know there was a National Front demonstration in the square. Plainclothes police officers providing security came to stop me as I started to remove a Beyoncé poster. I answered straight out that I was a fan and that it was for my room.
After the detachment, do you work on the raw uprooting or is there recomposition?
If I manage to salvage a cake with seven or eight layers—which is exceptional—the question doesn't arise because there will be enough material. Most of the time, I end up with three or four layers. In that case, I prefer to put a false base behind it with a few colors, which allows me to protect myself if I puncture it or to scrape away any interesting material in the previous layers. I think my work needs at least four layers to be truly beautiful. Cutting is like a lake: if the color isn't right, you carve out the area, leaving a small beach all around, leaving two islands inside. But by reducing the surface area by half, you end up losing interest, because the colors either cancel each other out or reappear.
THE MIRROR FOR LARKS
The advertising poster is a mirror held up to our desires. Your action directly impacts the advertisement itself, but also the collective memory it conveys.
My work is quite restful because of the presence of a subject, without being subjected to advertising slogans or logos, which I systematically tear apart. By blurring all these layers, I transmute them into something that remains advertising material but is no longer advertising. This is something I experienced when I started twenty-one years ago, in May 2000, on what would later become Le Mur Oberkampf. It was during the dot-com bubble, and there were a series of campaigns for websites, using very aggressive advertising. I particularly remember a woman taking a mud bath with a pig. I cut triangles out of it: afterwards, people identified the work as my own, attributing it to me. But since then, screens have replaced posters: sometimes I'm interested in a piece of information, but when I turn my head, it's already gone, and I have to wait for it to reappear. So for the past few years I have turned to guerrilla advertising, which is popular with luxury or semi-luxury brands, even if the glue used does not allow for the best results.
There is a paradox between the duration of creation and that of preservation of this ephemeral medium.
A billboard is always placed where it's most visible. It would be absurd to put it in the middle of nowhere. Quite a few people tell me that what they enjoy most is watching me work, without even looking at the final result. Some have told me this several years later. This anti-advertising dimension is both basic and situational. I create a kind of disruption by setting up a situation that challenges the function of advertising. Even if it only lasts a few days, it's quite interesting. I'll always regret not having had my ladder in Frankfurt. There was a huge, very vulgar ad for Intimissimi, an Italian underwear brand. When subjects are larger than life, it does indeed give them a kitschy, almost statuesque quality.
The poster is not the only way you have to rework with street material.
My work also involves subversion. In the 2000s, the slogan on animal adoption posters was «"Come and adopt us"» that I had transformed into «"Come and torture us"» Someone couldn't stand it and came and scratched it. Sometimes I wish I were more recognized for these reinterpretations: the last one was for a Shen Yun performance, a dance troupe persecuted by the Chinese government for its association with Falun Gong. Starting with a double poster from the Gare de l'Est train station, I cut out the letters to spell "Schengen." During the Arab Spring, I repurposed a hotel advertisement by the artist Ben, adding "Ali": since he had just been killed, it worked perfectly with the slogan "Feeling at home somewhere else." For a tourism poster about Tunisia, "so beautiful and so close," featuring a woman walking in the desert, I transformed "Tunisia" into "The Factory.".
A LOOK BACK
Do you consider Street Art to be an artistic movement? If so, do you consider yourself part of it?
I think the concept of an artistic movement is completely ossified. When you look at history, you find traces of urban art in the 60s and 70s through the Provo movement. The word art This defuses the discussion; perhaps we should be talking about culture. Urban planners still haven't grasped what graffiti is: if there had been a decline in the number of graffiti artists, we would know about it. Conversely, when we consider the number of people who will explain that tags are art but that femicide posters are a political act, we understand what this ideology, which reduces art to aesthetics or to a depoliticized provocation like contemporary art, is really serving.
We are currently at a generational turning point, linked to the expansion of digital communication. The idea of tag, to take photos on his wall Facebook, through avatars that are like doubles. Urban and digital cultures are much closer than one might think. There is now a pseudo-expert population of collectors, who no longer possess the same candor as the photographers of the 90s and 2000s, leading to a certain rigidity in urban design. It will take another twenty or thirty years for this to become a better understood phenomenon. We will see how this postcard-like representation of urbanism evolves.
This archive project is independent — Offer a coffee