January 2007 Inside Outsider Art By P.B. Lecron The most underground and ephemeral of arts, graffiti, is gaining prestige and staying power—not to mention euros—in France. Urban art collectors take note: More than 20 years after their clandestine graffiti début, a handful of persevering French street artists are showing up on the pages of investment magazines. “So much the better,” says Jérôme Mesnager as he’s handed a copy of La Vie Financière in which his work is featured as a smart buy in the art market section. Mesnager is the creator of Le Corps Blanc, an ethereal white figure that has leapt and danced across decaying walls and condemned buildings since 1983. Now legendary, the naked, innocent Corps Blanc has puddle-hopped through Paris, then out into some 20 other countries, even scaling the Great Wall of China. French galleries and auction houses sell Mesnager’s fetishized figure on canvas as well as on surprising but striking sections of wooden fences.

© P.B. Lecron

Rapidly painted freehand in some of the most unexpected places, Le Corps Blanc resembles a posable wooden mannequin come to life. The icon has withstood the test of time, despite the ephemeral nature of street art. Some disappear when buildings are razed or walls are cleaned and repainted, or when other graffiti artists cover them over. In certain neighborhoods, however, the graceful figures have become part of the local heritage, like the giant mural Mesnager painted high up on a building in the 20th arrondissement at 68 rue de Ménilmontant.

Although a number of Corps Blancs can still be seen, especially in the Latin Quarter, Mesnager knows of only one in Paris that actually dates back to 1983. He’s reluctant to say publicly where it is, for fear that taggers—the bane of any city dweller’s existence—might blot it out with their own scrawling signatures. When a well-placed Corps Blanc does meet such a fate, Mesnager takes it in stride. “I usually wait until the city cleans away the tag, then I repaint.”

That public authorities today distinguish between the differing forms of graffiti and leave his and other street artists’ works in place is a triumph in itself. Mesnager recalls that once the city erased without notice a stencil on his exterior wall that a top graffiti artist, Miss.Tic (pronounced mystique), had painted as a surprise for him. “I really was not pleased to lose my Miss.Tic!” he says, chuckling at the play on words.

The halcyon “avant-tag” period
Miss.Tic’s provocative stenciled self-portraits, which are always accompanied by pithy double entendres, have had wide appeal. A phenomenal success and extremely active, she’s had numerous shows in galleries and institutions, and has received commissions from Longchamp, Louis Vuitton and Kenzo. Miss.Tic’s latest feat was to spray-paint more than 100 stencils on walls throughout the 13th arrondissement this past summer for an open-air exhibit sponsored by the city of Paris, “Femmes Capitales.” Miss.Tic’s ironic works mirror the feminine mystique of the modern Parisian woman, in all her superficiality and profundity. She clicks so well with the public that another artist has created a parody stencil, “Miss.Toc.”

Like Mesnager, Miss.Tic is a first-generation Parisian street artist who began painting city walls in the 1980s to capture an immediate audience for her work. During this “avant-tag” period, the development of art in the streets was relatively well tolerated. Graffiti made its entrance into private galleries and became a part of the cultural heritage.

Criminalization and cleanup
The 1970s New York graffiti explosion didn’t arrive in Paris until the 1980s, and, according to French sociologist Alain Vulbeau, it wasn’t until 1988 that the proliferation of tags became unbearable for the Parisian population. Journalists no longer spoke of graffiti in benevolent terms; and in the public mind, taggers were urban vandals who had exceeded the bounds of street art. Authorities put the brakes on the graffiti movement, especially for legally responsible adult graphistes, by criminalizing the defacement of public property and making violations punishable by high fines and prison sentences.

Paris—and other French cities with the financial means to do so—mobilized anti-tag cleaning forces. In 2000 the mayor of Paris hired two private enterprises to patrol and remove graffiti from private and public walls within 10 days of its detection. The city provides the service for free; however, if the property owner refuses the offer, removal of the graffiti is still mandatory and must be done at the owner’s expense. The result is that within the city limits, on any given afternoon Paris seems to be remarkably tag free, the cleanup squads having already erased the preceding nights’ tags. In a single year, this amounts to over 155,000 square yards of graffiti.

Another preventive measure has been to tolerate graffiti on certain walls within the city to give graffeurs who paint large, colorful calligraphy “fresques” a place to express themselves. (One of the most prominent “free-spray” walls is a construction fence along the edge of the Palais de Tokyo.)

Street artists get organized
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and sorting out “art” from “vandalism” has stirred controversy. Paris’s street artists, however, have by and large reconciled themselves to a system of notifying city or arrondissement officials and receiving authorization, not only to guard against legal proceedings but to spare their works.

Getting organized enhances the work’s survival, too. As of 2001, when the artists’ association Lézarts de la Bièvre opens up its 70 studios to the public each spring, it invites a street artist to paint on selected walls along the studio circuit in the fifth and 13th arrondissements. Miss.Tic inaugurated the tradition and was followed the year after by Mesnager. Nemo, creator of a whimsical black stenciled shadow man in coat and hat, came next, then Mosko et Associés added their signature African savannah creatures. In 2005 came the grandiose Speedy Graphito, another first-generation street artist, who takes angular forms and robot figures several steps further than Keith Haring’s rollicking geometric shapes.

Each artist’s work is added to the preceding one, forming visual dialogues. Featured 2006 graffitist Jef Aérosol has been a popular stencilist since the early decades. Reflecting on his career, he says, “Obviously, [my work does] belong to that thing called ‘street art,’ even though this is a very vague term…. But I definitely don’t belong to any graf, tag, hip-hop, rap, writers, stickers—call it what you will—‘movement.’ What is very important is that I had never seen any stencils on the street when I painted my first one”—in 1982!

“My influences are not especially street artists, except the awesome Ernest Pignon-Ernest. I was lucky to meet him and had the privilege of sharing the bill with him in an art show in Paris. I don’t feel especially close to other stencilers, since there are so many different styles and approaches in that category. Spray cans and stencils are only tools, like brushes or pencils. Inspiration and style are another thing,” notes Aérosol.

“The only thing that matters for me when working on the street is sharing: sharing with the walls, with my friend the City herself, and with the crowds that walk past my life-size characters every day.” His street paintings, he says, are gifts to the public, and each passerby’s gaze is his reward.

P.B. Lecron keeps a weather eye on the walls of Paris.

Check it out

Femmes Capitales Map showing stencil locations: www.missticinparis.com. Click on Les Expos de la Miss and scroll down to Exposition à Ciel Ouvert. 13th arrondissement.

Lézarts de la Bièvre Maps showing locations of street artists’ work: www.lezarts-bievre.com. Click on 6èmes Journées Portes Ouvertes, then on neighborhood names at bottom. 5th and 13th arrondissements.

Galerie Anne Vignial Paris’s first urban art gallery. Jef Aérosol, Epsylon Point, Jérôme Mesnager, Mosko et Associés and VLP among others. 53 rue Charlot, Paris 3e, Métro: Filles du Calvaire, 01.48.87.01.00

Jardin d’Italie Pizza restaurant with a hand-painted floral exterior that’s something to write home about. Good pizzas, too, and on Miss.Tic’s circuit. 27 blvd Auguste Blanqui, 13e, Métro: Place d’Italie, 01.45.88.69.69

Chez Marianne Order a takeout falafel and admire a mural by Speedy Graphito and Mosko et Associés on the restaurant’s corner. A Marais classic. 2 rue de l’Hospitalière St-Gervais, 4e, Metro: Hôtel de Ville, 01.42.72.18.86

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