FKDL and the Collage of a Street Artists’ Life in a Book

July 26, 2018 Artists

As you look through this new slim volume about the Street Artist/fine artist FKDL it may strike you how much autobiography is the determinant of an artist’s path as well. It’s the tale of a teenager finding himself, finding his vocation, and eventually finding his voice on the street. When you reach the end you see that it takes a number of years and a lot of experimentation, this journey.

FKDL. Galiote Prenant. Choisy-le-Roi, France. 2017.

FKDL now tells his own grown kids, “everything you do now will come in handy later.” Don’t worry, nothing is wasted.

It’s good advice that should put many a teen graffiti writer and Street Artist at ease because that is the path that a creative life may take before it all sticks together and begins to make sense.

Pulling imagery and text and memories and infatuations from his own formative events and through each era, FKDL uses a process of sorting into piles, sifting, putting relevant elements along side or over top of one another, constructing a cohesive view. With seemingly disparate pieces of stories he organizes a view that turns into a narrative of the imagined, the aspired to, an ideal.

FKDL. Galiote Prenant. Choisy-le-Roi, France. 2017.

The French street artist uses the walls of the public walkway as a principle staging to test his work and expose his process to the public. Until the last decade the audience was in galleries or his studio but his is a strange new liberation and the feedback he receives gives him direction for what follows. These are lessons he would not have known way back in high school studying fashion, or later learning about how to join the circus, but he still brings that training to the game today.

He speaks of his testing grounds for his Street Art – the neighborhoods of Le Marais, Les Halles, Belleville, and Monmontre in Paris. ” The Streets are where I test the durability or impact of an idea, an image, an icon. I build, I glue, and I wait. How social media, vandals, and the public works teams respond to my collages tells me whether the work is successful or not.”

FKDL. Galiote Prenant. Choisy-le-Roi, France. 2017.

This new book tells in detail the path of a creative painter, collagist, and even a maker of L’Art Scotch (tape art) over the period of a few decades. Perhaps most impressive is the very organized collection of vintage French magazines from the 40s, 50’s, 60s that he has amassed and the myriad intricately woven tales of love and glamour and disappointment and treachery that can be buried among those pages and used to construct new dramas.

For him, its mostly about love. As a fairly linear narrative, the book also shares memories and perspectives from the artist about getting his work shown in galleries, joining group shows, receiving awards, wheatpasting with friends on the street, spending hours in his studio.

FKDL. Galiote Prenant. Choisy-le-Roi, France. 2017.

“Happiness is a sustainable state of psychological balance that should last over time,” he says of his own philosophical practice of actively choosing to be positive, including in his art making.

“It is a demanding practice, to think that, in the light of what we have experienced and wish to experience, each one of us is the principal creator of his own happiness and has an impact on that of others around us.”