As the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has obviously put new constraints on the international mural festivals which populate our site through warmer months, it’s interesting to witness how each institution has manipulated their former model to accommodate the new normal. Even better than interesting, it’s a source of ebullience to understand that art persists at all costs.
France’s Wall Street Art festival took their swing at adaptation last month after a harrowing year of questions. “Due to the health situation, the 2020 edition of the Wall Street Art festival of Grand Paris Sud was disrupted,” wrote Gautier Jourdain, a curator and gallery owner in Paris’s 13th arrondissement who provides artistic direction for the festival. “No realisation before the summer holidays, everything has been postponed to the autumn.” Fortunately, French street artist Seth followed in the footsteps of Gilbert Petit’s recent work in Moissy-Cramayel to break the grayscale monotony with his painterly talents, completing a new mural in the southern Parisian suburb of Grigny.
Wall Street Art festival takes place annually in the Île-de-France region just outside of Paris. As last year’s article on Wall Street Art Festival noted, this region features the sociological experiment of “new towns,” purposefully engineered areas intended to contend with population growth. As I noted in last year’s article, art interventions like Seth’s latest work bring beauty for viewers and opportunity for artists, but they are also “the culmination of an ambitious project for the territory, of a desire to outweigh next to grand Paris, to increase the territory’s attractiveness, to create and support large-scale projects and to be involved regularly.”
“This town with a popular population became a real place of Street Art in the Paris region. With the festival, it has already welcomed Case Maclaim, Alber and Jace,” Jourdain explained. “The district where the fresco was painted is known as ‘La Grande Borne’ but it is also called ‘La Cité des Enfants.’ This is why the organizers of the festival wanted Seth to come and paint there, as he is world famous for his paintings of young people. As is often the case, Seth took into account the environment of his wall. He decided to open the building to a shimmering nature, which is often missing in this kind of suburb.”
Seth’s oeuvre consistently features figures of youth, a choice which speaks directly to the younger generations, but also symbolizes potential, buoyancy, and hope for the future. These themes are further emphasized by the artist’s style, colorful and decisive. Humankind reached photorealism’s upper-most bounds first with Italian Renaissance paintings and more recently in the digital sphere with technology that’s evolved beyond elementary pixels. Seth’s work draws upon the new ultra-realistic design sensibilities found across all manner of screens — its figures could plausibly exist in the real world, but they possess some additional sheen and sparkle, one part Photoshop and another part fairy dust.
Here, Seth paints a child nestled into the crevasse busted open by his mind, hands, and tools. Foliage springs from his painterly chasm, the child examining the luscious pinks and greens which sit beneath a bright blue sky. When the weather is right, this work creates a bit of trompe l’oeil, blending with Gringy’s actual landscape to shake the viewer from mundane reality so they understand some ever-present wonder beyond it.
According to the artist’s website, Seth was born in Paris and began painting the city’s streets in the 1990s, establishing a name and developing his unique characters amongst the facades of the 20th district. From school at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs to founding the art publishing house Wasted Talent in 2004, Seth has remained committed to exploring “his distinct painting style, working often with the theme of childhood. Using the wall as a blank page, Seth relies on one hand the individual or collective imagination – local gods, myths, or tales. The child becomes a spokesperson, a messenger of his investigations. He puts into play his image of innocence, and places his character in difficult social, political and geographical contexts.”
“In the coming days, the festival will continue,” Jourdain noted. “The female artist Lady M. will come to paint a huge abstract fresco in the town of Lieusaint then the town of Combs-La-Ville will welcome her first monumental fresco with the Franco-Austrian duo Jana&JS.” In imitating the steady return of its partnering artists, Wall Street Art festival upholds the mission its held since its inception in 2015 of “Embellishing the facades, showing beauty and color, [and] promoting exchanges between artists and residents,” no matter what the years dream up. Stay tuned for more.
Seth: website | facebook | instagram
Wall Street Art Festival: website | facebook | instagram
