Some of us travel with a water color book to sketch the world with the tip of the brush, others sketch it with the caps, on subway, walls. Mr. Wassup book of travels is all over his instagram account, a day to day journey printed on plane tickets like a collection. Although it seems to be a travel book, it is also an artistic issue.
I am under the impression that we are experiencing vacations for months, they started like six months ago, since March everything is lasting like August only too long. Lockdown had me tackle my articles through the unfamiliar of some Youtube or Instagram accounts from writers around the world. Yes it is disorienting to scroll Instagram writers’ accounts from Miami to Jakarta. I see myself watching a 1UP short movie painting a subway in Berlin under climes penetrated by flashes of fireworks, people were stunned. I also see myself watching photos of KIVI on the beach of Odessa, or photos of SAN ONE in Honolulu. Those photos are not only important because they refer to something essential when the distance offers the possibility. Those accounts provide for action photos, live atmosphere, portrait.
Among them, you have Mr. Wassup’s account, with block letters LOVE through Europe, Asia or South America. Some pictures show letters on various trains from Italy, Germany, Sweden and boats from Bali, graceful under Indonesian climes, where the shadows of the palm leaf stripe the colors spread out to the walls. Most of the photos which gather information about it seem to be jealously preserved from intrusive eyes. Like his letters on a train in Sao Paulo, drooped, we get to see very little, more a panoramic picture of the city, gloomy comment. Or the ones on Muscovite subway where we get the perfect head of the machine breaking off the convergence lines with its tubular box. Wassup definitely creates a mysterious atmosphere out of his letters.
Enigmas ruptured that Wassup seems to prefer to maintain with poetic intervals (study of the creative process). Pixels spout out of the scintillation of a wire wheel machine bumping into a subway door. A cloud of paint only visible because of a light bulb glistening inside a tunnel somewhere in the world. Those photos limit how we perceive the work to introduce the process of creation. They free the paint from the “esthesis” (how we perceive the work) of a frontal camera angle, it looks despotic, up on its throne. Just like an anamorphosis, those camera angles create a new perspective where the blue of the sky play with the obscurity of the metropolitan labyrinth, where the horizon of the sun breaks those of the tiles of its stations. The look of a female spectator wearing or not a bikini, it abolishes the dryness of a picture purely informative. They put the paint in context and they tell what was going on during the creative process, they make it alive.
Poetry intensifies these camera angles where sometimes we see the painters go through by narrow entries, some verticals dizzying tubes, some never ending ways along the railways, forbidden support like an excellent fruit…those pictures seize those attitudes calculating the space and the time parameters to measure their work comparing them to the excessiveness of the big cities and their complexity, capturing the gestures of the painting bigger due to the length of the work, imposing, on an enormous support as well; prominent ride horse onto the head of that big iron horse resting under surveillance inside its underground stable; and the last shots of the getaway blocked; we could think that the process of creation could end up here. Coming out of that improvised workshop, where the day to day life seems to be put on hold. But the air of the surface cannot announce the end of the act of the interventionism of the artists from the 70s and the beginning of the everyday life again.
Actually the air puts its continuity together, the logical sequel of the process of creation which feed itself from life, one you cannot lockdown inside the claustrophobic atmosphere of the studio. The set of pictures which are defined as the unusual Wassup’s travel book, could be taken along a coastal path, the curve of a craggy road, a private parking lot. That making of which is not affordable to any passenger or walker who then become spectator, it is not just bonus. It gives life to the painting by revealing all the performative process, the complexity of the painter’s context. They reveal the evolutionism of the modification the painter made. The piece of work does not spout spontaneously anymore on the support as a creationist act, it elaborates in life. The ordinary which feeds the painting, which takes possession of the man, and alter by its presence. By replacing the usual nobility repository of the frame to use it as a support, could we consider that the transposition of the alteration paint announces the desire to honor the daily?
Follow Mr.Wassup on Instagram
Written by: LADY K
Translation by: Sarah Gozzi
Article first appeared on the Paris Tonkar Magazine
