High Graffiti

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

When you think of fugitive urban art -- clandestine work scrawled, spray-painted, or postered on city surfaces -- you naturally think of the graffiti subculture or cheeky political image-makers like Britain's Banksy, who decorates London with rocket-loaded American helicopters and women clutching bombs in autoerotic embraces. You don't think of a 64-year-old Frenchman steeped in the Old Masters, with draftsmanship that's pure 19th century, and whose self-declared goal is 'to solve certain very important problems concerning the insertion of an image in a real space.'

Ernest Pignon-Ernest, based in Paris, is a one-of-a-kind artist for whom the street is a sculptural setting onto which he attaches careful, beautiful charcoal drawings and silkscreen posters -- without permission. These have ranged from images of the notorious visionary poet Arthur Rimbaud, coat over his shoulder, haunting the sides of buildings in Paris and his hometown of Charleville, to dramatic figures adapted from Baroque paintings, attached to the crumbling walls of Naples (see www.pignon-ernest.com).

Far from making easy political hits or dropping soup?ons of surrealism into the urban fabric, Pignon-Ernest sees himself as creating a whole new kind of art object. 'I choose a real place,' he told the French online magazine seniorplanet in 2003, 'and slip an image into its interior, usually that of a life-size human being. ... I believe that the insertion of my image into the real world gives that reality the characteristic of an image.'

He calls these juxtapositions -- which he records in photographs -- ready-mades. The first and most famous ready-made, of course, was the spiky wine-bottle dryer that proto_dadaist hero Marcel Duchamp bought in 1914. Just as Duchamp's superficially tongue-in-cheek declaration that this everyday object was a work of art actually transformed it into a brilliantly strange piece of sculpture, so Pignon-Ernest's pictures don't just add art to the street -- they infuse the street with a particular kind of pictorial presence.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print