GRAPHITO – POLARIS
Speedy Graphito – if you missed the beginning
As the title suggests, this exhibition and publication will take you on an astonishing journey through the artist’s career. The pluralism that reigns in contemporary art can be confusing. That is why today is a special moment to be able to overview 40 years of creativity and audacity in these few pages.
While many changes have taken place among painters in recent years, Speedy Graphito has consistently and coherently pursued the pictorial research he began 42 years ago.
In 1984, Speedy Graphito began expressing himself on the streets by spray-painting his character Dédé the Demon on walls using stencils. From 1985 onwards, the artist developed this character into an angel, a demon, and a horseman (notably for the event
La Ruée vers l’Art, launched by the then Minister of Culture Jack Lang).
This multifaceted, free, and autonomous work invites us at each exhibition to look towards a new language. Gifted with insatiable artistic curiosity and creative drive, Speedy Graphito has experimented with (and mastered with success)
several techniques: stencils or murals, engraving, screen printing, photography, wood carving, ceramics, theater set design, music,
poetry, video… and, of course, painting on canvas. .
This variety of techniques is not intended to show off; it serves only to give shape to an astonishing faculty of imagination.
Although Speedy Graphito’s art was born on the streets and then developed in parallel in his studio, since childhood (at the age of 12 he was making copies of Vlaminck) as his main source of inspiration: his personal pantheon, the untouchable artists, the adored,
those whose practice he mistrusts, and those who have always amazed him and shaped his life. A dream team of art brought together under his brushes.
A daring creator who continues to embody the spirituality of street art, Speedy Graphito breaks down all barriers. Retaining the essence of his forefathers’ works, he examines them, dissects them, invites them to his street artist’s table, gives them a second
life and a new form of existence, intelligently adding the imagery of mass culture.)
Painting is an art, but not all painters are artists. Speedy Graphito is, and the sequence of superbly accomplished series he has produced over the first forty years of his career proves it. The quality of an
artist depends on how he tells a story. And Speedy Graphito conveys these stories, ours and that of art, with an ease that is unique to him. Each painting is painted as if it were the most important of his life. A declaration of love for the medium.
Jean Renoir, the filmmaker, said: “Our job is to look and open windows.” Speedy Graphito, a keen observer, looks at the history of
art, his history, our ever-changing world, in a wonderful way, and opens wide new windows that are just waiting for us to see what he sees. After all, isn’t it the role of the artist to continue to surprise us?