All posts tagged: Victor Hugo Celaya

Sten & Lex in Paris For Le M.U.R.

Sten & Lex in Paris For Le M.U.R.

July 23, 2012 , , ,

Le M.U.R. is a Parisian program of liberating billboards that since 2003 has been formally inviting artists to takeover spaces that would normally be filled with advertisements. So far this year they’ve had artists including Kid Acne and Vhils, with Ever and Astro coming up shortly. This month the Italian Street Art duo Sten & Lex were invited to install one of their distinctive sideways anonymous “stencil posters” in Paris for the Le M.U.R. program. As is true with much of their work, you may not recognize that this is a portrait of a woman unless you stand a back at a distance and change the perspective you are viewing it with.

Today we are pleased to introduce Victor Hugo Celaya, the man behind ARTO (Art Beyond Museums) and a resident of Mexico City, who was on hand to interview Sten & Lex about their piece. With Victor acting as our correspondent, our posting today is an exclusive collaborative feature just for you from ARTO and BSA.

Interview with Sten & Lex

Victor Hugo Celaya: What does creating work for such iconic program as Le M.U.R. mean to you?
Sten & Lex: Le M.U.R. was a very interesting project for us from the beginning because we had heard of it since 2003. In Paris it is almost an institution and also it’s the first time Italians intervene Le M.U.R.

Sten & Lex (photo © Victor Hugo Celaya)

Victor Hugo Celaya: The piece that you selected for Le M.U.R. — the image of a woman — does it have any special meaning?
Sten & Lex: No it doesn’t, it’s just an anonymous portrait of a woman. The portraits we usually do are of strangers. We usually chose the portrait of someone who looks like the people from the country where we do the work. On this occasion, this woman looks French but she isn’t. It’s an anonymous portrait of a serious person, which is in line with all the work we’ve been doing in the last few years.

Victor Hugo Celaya: Do you have a specific message you want to communicate through these anonymous portraits?
Sten & Lex: No, it’s a counter proposal to urban art that has taken on a more social and political nature lately. Hence, we prefer to do something on the side. We’ve never enjoyed doing pieces with specific messages; our work is the portraits. They don’t have any message, people see the portraits and they can have their own ideas about them and people have very different ideas.

Sten & Lex (photo © Victor Hugo Celaya)

 

Victor Hugo Celaya: You mentioned something important about the way artists use street art to convey social messages. Why do you not use it for that purpose? In general, how do you see urban art today and where is it going?
Sten & Lex: What interests me about urban art now is this contamination with contemporary art; our work has always been involved with art in general. There are no common messages in street art and there are no common techniques… Stencil is very common in street art but the way that we work is very different, it’s a technical study. In street art, we like not only the artists who work thinking about urban art as a stencil with a political message, but also as an installation or something figurative, abstract art. I find a lot of sense in street art at the moment.

Victor Hugo Celaya: Is there someone in the movement you admire?
Sten & Lex: Yes, for example, our work is greatly influenced by the way JR uses posters, the way he covers entire architectural pieces. This aspect of JR’s work has influenced us a lot. There are many things that have influenced us but not necessarily in the realm of street art. Our work is very subjective, the fact that we destroy the stencils and paste the posters is unique — that’s why we call it stencil poster. We paste a paper poster on the wall and then cut it. This was a subjective study we did together.

Sten & Lex (photo © Victor Hugo Celaya)

 

Victor Hugo Celaya: Okay, lastly, urban art by nature is on the streets. We specifically think of it as giving art back to the people. Is there anything of that sentiment in your work? What do you think of the statement “art to the people”? Do you think it’s something that goes along with your job?
Sten & Lex: It is a reality that street art belongs to the people, but I don’t think it’s easy to understand what people really like. That’s why we don’t really care what people think of our work.

In urban art there are two important aspects: the first one is that anyone can see your work and the second one is that it is closely related to institutional art, that’s the point of view of art critics, since in street art they don’t really exist. However, what does exist is an audience that decides who the best artists of the moment are. Nowadays, this critique is generated over the Internet, in the most important blogs that manage to create great media attention.

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To learn more about the ARTO mission and philosophy click here.

To learn more about L’association Le M.U.R. click here

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Mexico City: High Art in Thin Air

May 16, 2012 , , , , , ,

Capital Soars with Huge New International Street Art Murals

An Amazing Week in DF with Interesni Kazki, El Mac, Saner, Sego, Roa, Herakut, Vhils, and Escif

Gazing out at the sweep of metropolis that is modern Mexico City, you’ll have to catch your breath once in a while. A culture known for it’s historic public murals of the 20th Century, it looks like a resurgence is at hand, but this time the muralist are international Street Artists, and the scale is soaring.

Escif (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

The project “All City Canvas” invited nine artists from around the world and locally to use some of Distrito Federal’s prime real estate as just that – a canvas. With cranes and rollers instead of ladders and cans, these are some of the largest works we’ve seen by some of these artists. Here’s Portugals’ Vhils on the Dolores Building near La Alameda, there’s Germany’s Herakut on the side of the oldest newspaper in Mexico El Universal, and look way up to see LA’s El Mac signature portrait on the side of the Hotel Reforma Avenue. After eleven months of work getting permission from building owners, convincing city leaders, and securing major corporate sponsors, the capital of Mexico now has a few more major public art pieces that will blow you away and the resulting collection further secures this city of 21 million as one of the growing hubs of the Street Art scene.

ROA (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

We spoke with the three guys who organized the festival to get an understanding of the logistics and their aspirations for the project. As organizers and innovators with ties to their own arts organizations in Mexico City, each one of these guys hustled to make it happen; Victor Hugo Celaya of ARTO, Roberto Shimizu of MUJAM,  and Gonzalo Alvarez of MAMUTT. Participating artists were Interesni Kazki (Ukraine), El Mac (USA), Saner (Mexico), Sego (Mexico), Roa (Belgium), Herakut (Germany), Vhils (Portugal) and Ecif (Spain).

Brooklyn Street Art: Often Street Artists are relegated to the buildings that are abandoned and in a state of decay. In this case, your program featured work on the sides of some of the most important buildings in Mexico City. How did you get permission to do this?
Victor Hugo Celaya: Since the beginning, we wanted to offer an unique experience to the city so we took urban art to everybody – youth, businessmen, doctors, moms… In order to make a huge impact, we worked to obtain the best spots in Mexico City. Each of these buildings is seen by thousands of people each day and are all located in the city center of Mexico City. It was a difficult job, but in the end we got everything set up. The impact would not have been the same if we had painted other walls.

ROA (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

Brooklyn Street Art: Mexican culture has a proud tradition of public murals. How does the style of Street Art in 2012 differ from that tradition?
Roberto Shimizu: Obviously the Mexican history with mural painters and our cultural background, with artists like David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera – played a big part while we were conceptualizing the project. Mexico City has the perfect moral background to invite the best urban artists in the world to intervene its walls to create huge murals. We wanted to  innovate and create a new link with the past with some of the renowned urban artists of our time.

Brooklyn Street Art: Did you have difficulty persuading building owners to allow this work on their property?
Gonzalo Alvarez: It was difficult to get to the owners, since these people are important business people that don’t have “a lot of time”. Nevertheless, after a lot of work and perseverance we got to show them the project.  Once we got to them, we realized they are great people who were interested in getting involved in new innovative projects for the city. At the end, all of them were very happy with the outcome of the festival.

ROA. Detail. (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

Brooklyn Street Art: Is there a graffiti/Street Art “scene” in certain areas of D.F.?
Victor Hugo Celaya: DF is one of the biggest cities in the world – the 2nd biggest, so it is a natural hub for the urban art scene. The movement is very alive at the moment and it is giving Mexican artists an opportunity to show themselves to the world. With this project we wanted to make a statement to the world, that urban art is not only for young people that live in and around big cities – it’s for everybody – doctors, politicians, business people, Moms, merchants… For example, the intervention of the W Hotel, which is located in one of the most “posh” neighborhoods in the country, was very disruptive because nobody could have imagined an urban artists painting a huge mural on the same terrace where they usually eat their lunch or have their business meetings.

SEGO (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

Brooklyn Street Art: In the last few years we have been seeing many international Street Artists traveling to large cities around the world doing commissioned work for local festival organizers. How do these traveling artists affect the art scene in the local Mexican context?
Gonzalo Alvarez: This was also very important to us when we were conceiving “All City Canvas”. First we wanted to show young artists that if you do a good job doing what you like, you can actually earn money and travel around the world. You can take your art to other cultures and if you are good enough, you could influence someone else.

Secondly, many artists in Mexico have no money to travel to other countries, and many of their influences  come from the pictures they see on the Internet. To have this world-known urban artist in Mexico City was an unique opportunity for these young artists to watch, compare and learn their techniques.

SEGO. Detail. (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

Brooklyn Street Art: Can you talk about the vibrant youth culture in Mexico City and how it responds to this kind of work?
Roberto Shimizu: Yes, Mexico is a young country, and more than half of the population is under 30 years of age. We noticed how important cultural events like this are for the young people. Each day thousands of young Mexicans congregated outside of the buildings the artists were painting – they wanted to watch the work and to understand the artistic process of the artwork. Also we offered a series of conferences called WORDS and a gallery exposition called WORKS to offer different points of view of the urban art scene. What we found is that young people in Mexico are very keen to learn and participate in these kinds of projects.

Also on the other hand, the feedback from the Mexican youth is very honest and direct. If you are doing something wrong they will let you know –  also they’ll let you know if you are doing something right.

Vhils. (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

Vhils. Detail. (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

Sego and Vhils process shots. (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

Herakut (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

Herakut (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

SANER (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

SANER. Detail. (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

Interesni Kazki (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

Interesni Kazki (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

El Mac (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

El Mac. Detail. (photo © courtesy of All City Canvas)

For more information about the “All City Canvas” project, please click here.

MAMUTT (www.mamutt.mx)

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