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 for the artist who is considered as the  » king of street art in France  »
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?

No viewpoint is privileged for the spectator, as the painting offers a frontal, even view across the entire surface of thecanvases. The nuances and swings of color, which seem to dance  like free electrons, the luminosity, the chromatic variations, everything builds up into a complex, self-contained the dynamism of our gaze. Each TOTEM is projected as a set of blood vessels, constituting a body in which colors, fabrics and shapes circulate in a loop, tissues and shapes circulate in a loop, giving life and function.
Each work tells its own story, the one we want to see. we wish to see. The power of these works leads us to a chromatic meditation.
This creative freedom has always been Speedy Graphito’s credo. Graphito shows and proves once again that an artist never stops searching for new forms of expression, and this continual this continual pictorial inventiveness has delighted us every year for 40 years

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.

The spectator only recalls the parts kept in color in which Picasso is painting on a glass slab, he does not remember that the movie is mainly in black and white.

The exhibition The Real World is in black and white leads to the questioning of the notion of truth in color. A new found unity between night and day can be perceived.

The exhibition presents pieces from different artists working around black and around white, or using color in a way that unexpectedly, doesn’t give the spectator the immediate impression to be in front of color.

What might be considered as a radical shift in his work, is just a Resolution to devote a new series to this exercise. Speedy Graphito’s first abstract paintings  appeared in his 2003 exhibition at the galerie Polaris « Wake Up » . Then again, two years ago in the same galerie Polaris, two large abstract paintings on canvas could be seen in the exhibition « Start Over ».

When looking at these geometrical structures, the viewer is free to imagine any figurative form thanks to a successful fusion between the use of colours and the invention of forms involving energies, mingling, superpositions and explosions of colours.  The artist questions the development of forms throughout the history of painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and video-art with a piercing  irony and a caustic analysis of Art History.

From the human being’s desire to express himself to the so called image ‘of the future’, what shall we – as viewers -   keep in mind? What shall we choose to keep in mind as icon of this generic knowledge?

By linking graffiti’s historical and epistemic concept and its relationship with today’s virtual image, Speedy Graphito analyses their similarities and differences throughout the narrative structure of the exhibition.

The result is not just a study but a transmission of the artist’s perception of the world via his paintings.  He underlines with skill and irony our current situation: we are overwhelmed by an avalanche of images which we are no more able to understand nor take in… lack of time, lack of means?

Just for the time of an exhibition Speedy Graphito,by giving   us the role of reader, continues to disconcert us. He scrambles our points of reference and forces us to reconsider, on the basis of his proposals, the labyrinth of today’s art history in which we play (for the time being) the lead role.

The exhibition presents works by Bart Baele,  Yto Barrada, John Casey, Stéphane Couturier, Bouchra Khalili, Speedy Graphito, Laure Tixier, and Patrick Guns.

When Bernard Utudjian opened the galerie Polaris in the small space of the rue Michel Le Comte, one of his first exhibitions was dedicated to Speedy Graphito. It was the artist’s first presentation in a gallery. Then, there were 9 solo exhibitions in which were shown paintings, drawings, installations, videos, multiples and photographies, depending on the themes the artist chose. 2003 is the year of the last collaboration of Speedy Graphito with the galerie Polaris at its previous location:  8 rue Saint-Claude in the 3^rd arrondissement of Paris.

2012,  Speedy Graphito and Bernard Utudjian felt the need to set up this exhibition recounting 25 years of Speedy’s  career. The two main reasons for this project are to show to the public (old and new) the incredible evolution of this artist and to put into perspective what can be considered like a genuine artistic career. In times when Street Art and Graffiti art are back in the limelight and Speedy Graphito considered as an emblematic and extremely inventive figure of these movements, it was important to not only focus on the latest painting, drawing or sculpture freshly out of the studio but to explain the long process that leads to these works. Speedy Graphito questions the relationship between art and society. Thanks to his style – recognizable at a glance – he has constantly developed an original vocabulary confronting parody and serious matters.

If it is impossible to summarize some twenty five years of creation, one thing is certain: Speedy Graphito has always succeeded in renewing himself. He always « puts himself at risk » and  shows up where he was not expected.  He has a natural sense for experimenting and using any  material likely to quench his thirst for creation.