Les Frères Ripoulain Univers parallèle Opening on Saturday 4 October 2014, at 7pm Our proposal for Galerie Eva Vautier is entitled Univers parallèle .
Les Frères Ripoulain Univers parallèle Opening on Saturday 4 October 2014, at 7pm Our proposal for Galerie Eva Vautier is entitled Univers parallèle . It is a contextual painting on glass that takes up the aerosol drawing technique used by painters at markets to depict landscapes. The painting is made inside the gallery’s window and then entirely covered with black paint once completed, so that it can only be read from outside, thereby accentuating the spatial and mystical dimension of this graphic universe. Univers parallèle is a proposal echoing the issues of the Market Zone project: it questions what globalisation does to vernacular know-how, and how the market, as a space, favours the conservation and perpetuation of practices halfway between applied art, craftsmanship and spectacular industrial production. Vernacular, originally the product of a community and therefore of a territory, one might suppose that this market space is, compared with consumer society and mass retail (which levels out all the specificities of territories and subjects them to the imperatives of tourist folklore), a “nomadic territory” with its own – commercial – modes of existence, which have remained almost unchanged since the 1960s. These conditions have made it possible to sustain, or even keep intact, a corpus of practices halfway between art and craftsmanship, which without them would probably have disappeared: what was originally called street art , those known as street performers ; aerosol landscape painters, statues that come to life for a few coins, caricaturists, portraitists and silhouettists who sketch in haste, extending to chalk fresco artists on the tarmac, pocket magicians and puppet demonstrators, to name only a few. What these have in common, if not a practice of recycling forms borrowed from various disciplines – mainly the history of painting and of theatre – is creative imperatives unilaterally oriented towards subsistence, and therefore towards profitability. And this condition of existence, tied to immediate commodification, gives these practices the character of brief and spectacular forms, insofar as they dramatise a know-how in order to attract passers-by. They partake of demonstration or performance, because they must be mobile and easily reproducible, with an economy of means dependent on the limited production conditions available to their performers and on the limited attention passers-by will give them. These mobile practices are globalised in the sense that they flourish and are reproduced everywhere in the world. We made some images of these spray can artists (as they have been called since the 1970s) who handle aerosol paint cans with more than dexterity and tricks, at markets. We found as many in Saint-Malo as in Belgrade or New York. Their pictorial style, while partly constrained by the technical properties of aerosol – quick drying, immediate coverage, the texture and plasticity of solvent-based paint, which allows effects of…
