SHEIK- I don’t remember my first drawing at the point the closest people I know told me that I was born with a pen in my hand. I think I started Graffiti in middle school like many suburban teenagers here – nearby Paris – I saw a wholecar from BABS UVTPK, one of the most known during this time: a white “CIEL”, when I was waiting for a train to go to Paris with my Grand Parents. Can you Imagine the impact of such an amazing thing coming into your eyes as a creative kid? I started to talk about graffiti to my grandmother all day long that day and think I still bother her with it today. Actually, she offered me my first marker that day. It was a Wednesday (2001). The week after I was writing my first tag in the bus I was taking to go to school. A few years after (2008) I painted my first trains with my friend TEKSE with whom we opened our tattoo shop in 2018. Years are going too fast, I wish I could have done more!
I don’t consider my graffiti an act of defiance. Do any kid is writing on a wall to provoke “adults”? I prefer to call it freedom. I use trains like media. Even if I like to spend time on a wall with friends and a euphoric ambiance, I prefer to focus on these giant metal beasts. First because of the spots which make each picture different or richer (warehouses, yards, in stations or even running in a forest or a city. And maybe also because the public can interact in various spontaneous ways, asking, mocking, even police can have their way to interact despite the fact most of the time they are meaningless in their interests…
Despite many failures, I do the Graffiti that pleases me. I don’t like fences, literally, and figuratively. I can’t stand doing the same never-ending style since there are 26 Letters in our alphabet and as many alphabets as there are cultures. I can tell about thousands of styles the graffiti culture shows but I like to inspire myself with more than this culture could give. I like architecture, contemporary art as parietal arts, graphic design… Even music can inspire my way to groove with letters. I am very attentive to textures around me, everywhere there is way to collect ideas… It gives me a lot of inspiration for interiors or backgrounds. It even taught me how to give up with straight outlines: the softness that a cap or a bomb can give permits to add even more details when an outline doesn’t looks perfect. See how a building is decaying: its edges won’t stay sharp as long as it lives. I now think that decay is a part of life and everything in this world is even more beautiful after having started to “rebuild” itself its own way. The exact opposite of advertisement or every kind of elitist art of “perfection” makes me sick.
Using deconstruction over graffiti opens my doors to keep having fun with it until totally push it to abstract. I think I have learned recently some new cool ideas that make me think it is for me the very beginning of a new way of painting. It will permit you to make me to spend even more time playing with graffiti as a kid living in an adult body.
As you’ll see in these pictures, I also like to play with words to think about human problems, criticize how society is, sometimes make people laugh or react, and sometimes find something more poetic. For now, I am tattooing more than I paint but I try to keep my creativity and know that I won’t let go of this passion even when I will get old.
To conclude, I wish this culture the best she deserves and hope for more and more creativity over the years. I hope to keep my optimism and keep living my passion as I do now, as long as will live.
Authority: I think I just wanted the freedom that night. Sharing it graphically this way, drawing a line over it was my way to transpose this sentence I once heard before: “the forbidden won’t be the bearer of intelligence while teaching and sharing are”. I have found this person very wise.
Sheik (eclipse): This is my answer to all people reading too much newspaper or hiding behind their tv screens, totally forgetting how to think by themselves. I found that comparing a whole car with an eclipse was a way more optimistic vision of Graffiti since it doesn’t last as long as a few round trips. Instead of staring at it and opening their critical minds, they usually hate, for no reason. I love to show these pictures to random people who tell me they hate graffiti, most of the time, they change their minds without any explanation from my part.
Conserve Kind of a purist version. The SNCF renewed its version of the “Petit Gris” train (“little gray”, or “conserve”). Tekse and I just “scratched” their version like to kids wouldn’t resist opening a candy bar. I was one of the first time I painted a train without painting any panel.
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