Street art at the foot of the wall

About the great turn the street art movement is taking.

From the threat of prehistoric bears to that of police dogs, nothing has ever stopped human beings from covering public space. To paint, to draw, to engrave wherever he managed to gain access. To leave a trace. Even if they have to climb up or down. Even if he had to run away leaving the work unfinished. And since it was not until the 18th century that artists began to sign their work in the studios, it is not surprising that signatures did not appear in the street until the 20th century. So much so that the question arises in the 21st century: now that street art is producing works of art for sale and artists who are scaring the contemporary art market, that it responds to public commissions to become a tool for gentrification, that it is invading art galleries... can it still be considered alive? Starting from the premise that street art is instantaneous, fast, outlawed and whose aim is to get a message across without permission, Beaux Arts Magazine is categorical in the title of its investigation this month, assuming the exclamation mark rather than the question mark: "Why street art is dead!"

Nevertheless, the journalist immediately takes the opposite view of this provocative title. "By dint of having become an ultra-mediatized market object and while the major artists no longer want to be associated with the movement, has street art lost its soul to the point of disappearing? Not so sure," writes Hugo Vitrani. "A return to graffiti and paintings in the metro, feminisation and repoliticisation of messages... All the seeds of a revival are there. And then, over twelve pages, he develops a particularly complete assessment of the situation. For "more than sixty years after its flamboyant, naive and libertarian emergence, the misnamed street art is omnipresent. Except that just as it is not enough to be "subversive to be Dada, or to repeat Marilyn to be Pop", or to use chiaroscuro to be an Italian Baroque painter... it is certainly not enough to work in the street to belong to the street art movement.

So, as we have seen, "man is born a tagger". And the wall is not an innocent surface. "It is the blackboard of truancy", said Brassaï, the French photographer of Hungarian origin who immortalised the graffiti of Paris from 1930 onwards, encouraging passers-by to "develop the wild state of the eye, to undermine the very idea of fine art". Far from considering these signatures and dates engraved just about everywhere as vandalism, Brassaï even saw in them "the survival instinct of all those who cannot erect pyramids and cathedrals to leave their name to posterity". This is undoubtedly what prompted "the graffiti pioneers of Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York to evangelize the underground and the walls with a new belief: the religion of the name," writes Hugo Vitrani. The Beaux Arts Magazine journalist delved into Norman Mailer's seminal text, The Faith of Graffiti, published in 1974 in Esquire magazine. "An essential text for understanding what was behind the emergence of graffiti in its Americanised version," he says.

After the waves of repression and major clean-ups, graffiti revealed the security flaws in public space, and some artists refused to compromise themselves in dubious projects. Among them is Mode 2, a painter renowned for his figurative style and complex lettering, which he has been producing since the early 1980s. His work marked the beginnings of European graffiti, according to Beaux Arts Magazine's journalist. "Since then, between Paris, Berlin and London, he has frequented and observed the evolution of the movement by being close to several big names of the new generation, from Banksy to the Brazilian duo OSGEMEOS. "If teenagers in the late 1960s had not written their names on the walls and trains of Philadelphia and New York, there would never have been the current craze known as street art or urban art," says Mode 2.

"In 2003, street art is an ogre that tries to swallow its origins in graffiti," writes Hugo Vitrani. In a context of omnipresent advertising in the public space saturated with tags and graffiti in the 1990s, the ghosts of RCF1, the shadows of ZVES, the S logotypes of Stak, the characters of HONET, BarryMcGee and André, the mosaics of Invader, the horses of Reminisce, the stencils and public installations of Banksy, etc. first appeared. A scene described at the time as "post-graffiti" or "picto-graffiti". Today, the term "street art" divides people. It was imposed at the turn of the century, with the explosion of the market, of course. The formula excites art dealers and art collectors. It sounds like "pop art". But it is often rejected by the major artists of this scene. The distortion operated by specialised art galleries has locked street art into its most decorative aesthetic.

"The last ten years have been marked by artistic flashes and impostures", the journalist notes. "The year 2023 will undoubtedly mark the end of the shooting stars and the return to the artists who have marked history, or its successive evolutions. Like RAMMELLZEE, a too long forgotten icon of the 1980s, at the origin of a gothic, futuristic, opaque, warlike language, to whom the gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch recently devoted a major exhibition in Los Angeles. Along with A-One (Anthony Clark) and Kool Koor, he was a major inspiration to Basquiat. Collectors and curators are also taking a renewed interest in the ghostly paintings of Richard Hambleton and the ephemera of Gérard Zlotykamien, the pioneer of the movement in France and former assistant to Yves Klein. Street art is trying to find its supporting walls.

Meanwhile, the Parisian metros are still being painted despite the very heavy legal procedures put in place to prevent this, and graffiti is being sprayed on the roofs of the cities. While the official muralists work on scaffolding validated by the official authorities, a new generation is equipping itself with ropes and harnesses to better jump into the void. In the era of #MeToo, the ecological crisis, and the struggles of minorities in solidarity, the activists' punchlines are breaking through and challenging. History has yet to decide whether these new paintings will be remembered as works of art. But what is certain, when we observe the @douceurxtreme movement, is that we are far from the narcissism of graffiti, because no one here is trying to put himself forward. To sign.