Urban laughter

Miss.Tic, Overindulgence is good for your health , spray ink on silk canvas, 130 x 97 cm.

The Galerie Gallimard is pleased to host its first exhibition dedicated to urban art.

Alternatives editions have a long and beautiful history with this extraordinary artistic movement: more than one hundred titles in the catalog since 1985, when one of the very first French works, if not the first, devoted to the subject, Le livre du graffiti by Denys Riout, appeared.

The exhibition “Le Rire urbain”, co-curated with MEL Publisher, brings together artists who have chosen to express humor – from the lightest to the most caustic – in urban spaces as well as in the studio. Acrylic on canvas, Indian ink and wash on paper, stencil on slate sheets, stickers on panels, around twenty original works will be presented at the gallery from November 25, 2022. They will be accompanied by art editions in prints, produced by MEL Publisher, the publishing house created by Michel-Édouard Leclerc with the aim of promoting and making art accessible to as many people as possible.

The prints

Art editions in prints produced by MEL PUBLISHER. Online sale on the website www.galeriegallimard.com and in store, at the Gallimard gallery from November 25, 2022.

On sale January 2023: new prints by Ella&Pitr, Madame, Seth.

The artists

CLET was born in 1966. He graduated from the École des beaux-arts in Rennes and lives between Brittany and Italy. He uses discreet stickers to repurpose road signs that he sees as a symbol of authority. At first glance, his repurposings are striking in their fantasy and inventiveness. "My work immediately makes you smile. I try to remain universal and immediately understandable. But I seek a balance between the lightness that this humor gives off and a certain seriousness." His humorous traits can be discovered all over the world, from Paris to Tokyo, via London, New York, Rome...

ISAAC CORDAL , born in 1974, is a Spanish artist from Pontevedra in Galicia. His work includes sculpture and photography immersed in the urban environment. Squeaky and sometimes poignant, his works are tinged with a deep disquiet. He is responsible for many small-scale installations, where concrete Lilliputians find themselves grappling with the absurd. He favors men in suits and briefcases, like condensed urban solitude. The comedy in him is fierce. "We live," he says, "in troubled times, full of uncertainties, art is for me a strategy of struggle to understand the world we have created and if possible change it."

A duo of painters in the city and on stage, ELLA & PITR began to stick their drawings on the walls of Saint-Étienne in 2007. Known for their sleeping giants that they paint all over the world, they also work on canvas, concrete, ceramics... But inside and out, they express the same whimsical and clownish universe, recognizable among all. Their characters, larger or smaller than life, bizarre or poignant, mischievous and irresistible, invite us "to explore the world with an intact gaze, preserved from the heavy routine of life."1 Many of their creatures compose portraits of irresistible cheerfulness. "If our humor had a color, it would be in shades of red, like the noses of clowns!" jokes Ella.
Ella & Pitr are represented by the Le Feuvre & Roze gallery in Paris.
1 Martyn Reed, Founder of the NuArt Festival.

Born in 1957, JEF AEROSOL lives and works in Lille since 1984. Coming from the first wave of urban art, he began to apply his stencils in 1982. Since then, he has traveled to many countries to paint or paste his characters, often represented on a scale of 1. His work is now characterized by the significant use of black and white with the exception of this famous red arrow, trademark and "disruptive element"! His works can be seen in many exhibitions in galleries and museums, festivals, public sales and international events. Jef Aérosol delivers a humanist and poetic message that makes his work universal and timeless, always at the convergence of reflection and emotion.
He is represented by the Mathgoth gallery in Paris.

Born in 1991, LA DACTYLO is, in civilian life, a photographer. A few years ago, she opened an Instagram account where she chiseled out snippets of sentences in progress, before taking action in the street, inscribing text stencils on walls signed with her 2.0 secretary name. Now followed by nearly thirty thousand subscribers and solicited by numerous local orders, she crisscrosses France to put down her formulas that are by turns poetic, anxious or mischievous, thus attempting, she says, "to put into words the absurdity of the world."
She recently published Démo d'esprit, aphorisms and other prisms with Verticales editions.

Born in 1988, LEVALET , whose real name is Charles Leval, studied visual arts in Strasbourg. While obtaining his agrégation in plastic arts, in 2012 he began to paste his incongruous sketches in the streets of Paris. Generally done in Indian ink on kraft paper, they highlight the absurdity that sometimes emerges from everyday life… Influenced by burlesque cinema, among other things, Levalet breathes a poetic and dreamy dimension into situational comedy. He is fond of lunar and wacky characters, and all kinds of lost souls. “I like to make reality a little unreal by making it interact with a fictional element, and vice versa,” he explains.

MADAME was born in 1982. After being an actress and scenographer, she has been passionate about urban art since 2010. From old photographs from the last century, she creates new visuals where the image is always accompanied by a short sentence, tinged with humor and tenderness. These small collages are then scanned, printed in very large format and affixed in public spaces offering an open door to an offbeat, playful imagination, with nevertheless, according to the artist, "the unspeakable desire to go beyond laughter, to reflect on more serious and fundamental subjects of our time". For Madame, the street is an integral part of her approach, all the pieces she creates are first displayed there before being exhibited in galleries.

MISS.TIC , born in 1956, grew up on the Butte Montmartre. After living abroad for a while, she returned to France and turned a romantic disappointment into a source of inspiration. Stencils and spray paint became her favorite technique, and walls her medium. Miss.Tic is the first woman identified and recognized in urban art in France. In each of her stencils, she combines feminine silhouettes with short poems in the form of wordplay, as committed as they are lyrical. This silhouette that accompanies them – perhaps her double – is resolutely seductive, but the text introduces more depth, ambiguity and complexity into the representation of the female figure that is offered to the gaze. Miss.Tic continued her practice until her death in 2022.

RERO was born in 1983. He began practicing graffiti in the 2000s. Strongly influenced by philosophy and sociology, he has never stopped, through all his works and whatever the medium, questioning our society without ever judging but by putting us in a position to do so. The enigmatically crossed out messages, with uniform typography, have become the signature of this artist who bases his plastic research on the negation of the image and its potential polysemy. "It's about," he says, "multiplying the meaning of reading. Is it true? Is it the other way around? Did I go back on what I said? Is it censorship? Now, I'm starting to forget that it can even say what is crossed out!"
Rero is represented by the BackSlash gallery in Paris.

Julien Malland said SETH was born in Paris in 1972. A graduate of the École nationale des arts décoratifs, he began spray painting in the mid-1990s. In 2000, he published Kapital with Gautier Bischoff, a reference book on Parisian graffiti. Three years later, he set off on a world tour, sharing collaborations with street artists from different cultures along the way. An experience that notably gave rise to a series of reports on urban art for the show Les Nouveaux Explorateurs. He has since become famous for his poetic universe populated by children that he spreads all over the world and also on canvas or other media. This unrepentant traveler continues to regularly intervene in the streets of Paris.

ZEVS , whose real name is Aguirre Schwarz, started out as a graffiti artist in Paris in the 90s. His pseudonym is reminiscent of the train that nearly ran him over while he was tagging in a subway tunnel. From 1998 onwards, he abandoned traditional graffiti in favour of tracing the shadows of street furniture with paint before launching, a few years later, into the visual hijacking of advertising posters. In Berlin, in 2002, he took the muse of Lavazza coffees hostage and kidnapped the 10 m high poster. After this intervention, the artist began to hijack the logos of major brands by making them drip (liquefying them). Zevs is also known for his so-called "proper graffiti" works created on the dirty walls of the city. He paints messages invisible to the naked eye with a pressure washer that only ultraviolet light can reveal.
He is represented by the Magda Danysz gallery in Paris.

The texts of these biographies are partly inspired by the works published in October 2022 by Alternatives: Le Rire urbain by Sophie Pujas and Capitale(s), 60 ans d'art urbain à Paris under the direction of Magda Danysz.