Introduction to the Hexagon and beyond

In the last two decades French artists have imposed themselves on the global network that composes street art nowadays and are amongst the most creative. Influenced at first by the American pioneers of the genre, the Frenchies soon developed their own language to retranslate their life on their surrounding environment, the city, but also started to experiment and merge different aesthetic approaches.

In the 90’s artists such as Zevs or the Invader started to open new ways of investing public space, going way beyond the codes of tagging and bombing you find in traditional graffiti. Zevs completely hi jacked the messages of consumption society by stealing models pictures on billboards, while the invader traveled and tagged the world with his mosaic signature inspired by the arcade videogames of the 80’s. From the beginning of Graffiti in France in the 80’s, French painters have always worked on developing a genuine style that would be different from the codes of the American graffiti. More than any people, French care about style and innovation in style which led them to mix a variety of components and create a sort of avant-garde in graffiti that experts call post graffiti or street art.

TT crew gives a good example of versatility in the field of graffiti. The Bordeaux based collective was created in 2003 but all the members had a long background behind them. Most of them have made their classes practicing on trains or on the walls of abandoned factories. What brought them together is a common desire to go beyond barriers and experiment with materials and styles.

Currently most of the members, work as graphic designers, web designers or illustrators. This time 86/33 link brings four different members of TT crew who show the great diversity of styles that characterizes the collective. Supakitch is well known in the art scene with his cute furry animals that became a real trademark (www.metroplastique.com) distributed in Paris, New York etc…

Usine has developed a unique and graphic approach of fonts and seems to give life to the letters of the alphabet while Bobaxx owns a beautiful illustrative touch inherited from the old French engravings, and Franky la Guepe evolves in a post soviet aesthetics borrowing from propaganda art.

What’s up in the East??

Mushrooming buildings, ring roads, bill boards and walls, China’s tremendous development has erected a gigantic playground for creation, new spaces and ways of living. In the last decade, a new generation of artists is emerging from this urban hustle and proposes a new language to foresee the city, different than the ones of the real estate planners and the city consumers.

Fed since their childhood with the propaganda icons of their parents’ generation, Japanese cartoons and the multiple images of the global market, these creative youngsters are elaborating a language of their own, daring and straight forward ,by which they utilize the city as an aesthetic billboard.

Especially in China , the visual culture of the young artists is a rich mash up composed of many elements of the Chinese heritage (from Chinese characters to the numerous forms of pictorial art that have impregnated them ) and the global images brought by consumption culture and internet.

The years 2000’s mark a new turn where all the imported pop culture and the old Chinese artistic soul gets digested and turns into the elaboration of personal views and techniques to retranslate the city life. The specificity of this language is that it applies to living cities and not to gallery walls!

This is: Street Art!