"I have always liked my name, even after it became fashionable among people, and so, as young, educated people tend to do, I wrote it everywhere"
"I have always liked my name, even after it became fashionable among people, and so, as young, educated people tend to do, I wrote it everywhere"
Goethe
El Colgado is a retrospective of the Colombian-French graffiti artist Chanoir, charting his path as a visual artist, sculptor, graffiti writer and video artist. He founded the 1980 Crew, one of the most active groups of the "golden era" of Barcelona street art in the early 2000s. His career of more than 20 years in urban settings, in museums and in the major galleries of Europe, the United States and Colombia lends his work a much broader iconic vision and influence. This exhibition explores, and invites reflection on, the ways his work has been appropriated across different artistic spaces, with the aim of becoming part of a process of including graffiti within Bogotá's institutional, communal and local field.
Graffiti was created as a weapon of peaceful resistance against an oppressive system in cities around the world, originating in NYC, where walls, train stations and subway spaces are the appropriate venues that come to life and, most importantly, begin to coexist with the community that inhabits or passes through these places.
In the locality of Engativá, especially in the Barrio Minuto de Dios, this artistic practice is quite strong, to the point of coexisting with its residents; it is common to see facades intervened clandestinely, but it is also very common to find cases where property owners lend their facades to be painted—proof that, step by step, people have been interacting more and more closely with graffiti. "A fundamental part of the urban is the space we usually call public, and the ways we relate within it, toward it and with it. Culturally and legally we conform to certain behaviors in this space that often do not align with its dynamics—some of long tradition, others born of necessity. The street, as part of public space, is the quintessential site for exchange, for encounter, for all kinds of passage. There we constantly exchange products, experiences, knowledge, emotions, flavors, smells, colors, images." (Excusado Printsystem: 2007)
The figure of the black cat, an icon and reference that has appeared on streets around the world, is Chanoir's coherent guiding thread throughout his life as an artist; his cats adapt to spaces with a naïf style characterized by their bold colors. It becomes a children's game that also explores sculpture and video, drawing on characters from American and Japanese pop culture, such as: Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, Mazinger Z, among others; as Pablo Neruda put it well, "the child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived within him and whom he will sorely miss." In other words, it is an invitation to play, to return to our childhood and to not stop being the children we have always been, which, through a twist of fate, we have forgotten.
The show opens January 31 at 2:00 pm and will be open to the public until March 14, 2015.
Juan David Quintero
Curator