SPEEDY GRAPHITO – POLARIS
If many changes have been taking place in painting for several years, Speedy Graphito continues with constancy and coherence a pictorial research that he started 35 years ago.
His latest series Speedy Graphito seen by Speedy Graphito presents a set of paintings and works on paper in which he reinterprets his famous character created in 1985, the Speedy. It is in 1984 that Speedy Graphito begins to express himself in the streets by spraying his character on the walls with a stencil that the public will name the Speedy, which will be declined by its author in 1985 as an angel, a devil…This character will pass from the street to the canvas in the studio but will continue for a few more years to be shown on the walls of Paris.
Always haunted by this inner necessity of the artist, Speedy Graphito has always been free to act as he wishes, and the rest according to his desires, his research and his pictorial experiences. Having always liberated himself from the obligation of representation, being accustomed to the media image and the history of art, he frees the surface from the illusion of figuration. It is no longer a question of reproducing visible reality, but of representing all the layers in the evolution of his painting since its beginnings.
In this last series, he accentuates free forms and pure colors, as if the spirit were to finally triumph over substance, emphasizing the detachment of form in order to focus on the question of artistic content. By the use (for some years now) of the absence of contours, accompanied here by an intersection of lines and colors, the artist suggests a freedom of expression, but which is in fact very studied.
Worthy representative of the cosmopolitanism and energy belonging to street art, Speedy Graphito has always considered that color is invested with a primordial role. In his latest paintings, it is integrated as the central point of his preoccupations. It becomes itself form. Speedy, the main character whose form can be guessed in each of his paintings, was, is, and will remain in his work as a metaphor of the artist.
Wondering about the presence of the work in the work (a recurring motif in Jan van Eyck, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez Picasso, or Magritte), he delimits both the existence of a work, as well as the presence of a human being. But here Speedy Graphito refers to his own creation, to his own creations from his beginnings as an artist. He does not return to the starting point. On the contrary, by looking at his early works, Speedy Graphito questions us and projects himself towards the future of his own painting.
Dissociating shapes from colors becomes an exercise for the spectator: the shapes are precise, the colors become actor and contour, dispersing in space like sound vibrations, while maliciously and for our greatest happiness provoking the loss of our bearings, breaking the uniformity into innumerable fragments that divide and multiply in the space of the canvas.
These forms themselves contribute to figurative reminiscences of cited artists (Fernand Leger, Roy Lichtenstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselman, Joan Miró, Keith Haring…), each of the new compositions showing the role of internalization, appropriation, resumption and transformation in the creative process, linking like an organic continuum the styles and periods crossed by the artist.
These complex canvases manifest a new inspiration in acidulous colors, like a hymn to Art, placing the artist again and again at the heart of his artistic issues, and those of his time: the universality of painting.
It is this harmonious multitude that Speedy Graphito expresses here, at the highest level of his art, the color, enclosed by its single line, is nevertheless organized in a system of resonances, where microcosm and macrocosm answer each other. The colors burst, the light spreads in complex compositions, where details and nuances are superimposed.
But the best is still to forget any reference to reality to let oneself be carried away by the emotion.