A bit of sérendipité, really, to be tooling around Wynwood in a holiday mindset and a rental car at the end of the year, and to look up to see Mantra on a cherry picker. We had just seen him in Brooklyn the month before and here he was again, painting freehand, as he does, with such precision and commitment, which he also does.
The painting is thoughtful, as you may expect, with each of the collection a butterfly that can be found in Miami, he tells us. Next month he will be in Mexico in the middle of millions of – you know what.
Keep going strong, Mantra.
Binomial name, from left to right, top to bottom :
1A Eurema d. daira ♂ 1B Eunica Tatila ♀ 1C Zerene Cesonia ♀ 1D Phoebis Philea ♀ 1E Limenitis arthemis astyanax ♀ 2A Papilio P. Palames ♂ 2B Hypolimnas Misippus ♂ 2C Siproeta Stelenes ♂ 3A Eurema d. daira ♀ 3B Eunica Tatila ♂ 3C Zerene Cesonia ♂ 3D Phoebis Sennae ♀ 3E Eumaeus Atala ♂
Half biologist, half street artist, all gentleman. The French painter Youri Cansell AKA Mantra opens his very first US solo show tonight at Goldman Global Arts (GGA) in Miami. In preparation for “Metamorphōsis,” the artist has been painting non-stop all summer at a temporary studio in Cancun.
The 15 or so canvasses are gathered comfortably against a fresh seafoam green interior, nestled among large leafy installations by curator Peter Tunney, who finds a fine balance in his quest for creating a complementary environmental context in the space. Anchored at one end of the gallery by a full-wall spread photographic print (by Ryan Lynch), guests gain some sense of scale for the places Mantra has traveled in search of this species – in this case, an Ecuadorian forest preserve that the artist has traveled many times to in search of the blue morpho butterfly.
He found one and he has the pictures and paintings to prove it – two as the pristine collector’s presentation in shadow boxes, one in his new direction of presenting the Lepidopteran world – in their natural habitats of wood and leaves.
The precisely detailed, hued, textured, and shimmering beauties are evocative of autumn art-show glamour – all clad in satin and furs and bubbling golden champagne. Fashion may clearly not be Mantra’s intent here, but how can you not see these gorgeous beauties this way – a soiree of international stunners arriving single and with crew in tow; against this wall is his Costa Rican Collection – hanging directly across the room from his Mexican Ensemble.
Precursors to the butterfly, three moths are repping as well and in stunning detail. One’s massive wing-span is as large as yours – fingertip to fingertip – its textures and patterning subtle and luxurious tone-on-tone beige. Precise and accurate, any entomologist who sees this show will approve of Mantra’s depictions, and most likely they’ll marvel as well.
A departure from the pop-inspired, graphical, or wild-styled, Mantra’s studious realism is a far cry from what street art fans may associate with ‘the scene’. However, his teenage escapades on French city streets with aerosol-can-in-hand under cover of the night are exactly what brought him to this point. His professional ‘tag’ is to bear witness to realities of the natural world, and that can earn you just as much street cred in some circles as all species are increasingly under temporary and permanent threat.
We plan to ask him more tonight when BSA interviews Mantra here live for his official US debut.
First things first – Full disclosure; we are featured in the movie and we are close friends with both the subject of the doc and the director and we first suggested to the director that she was the perfect candidate to make a film about Martha Cooper. Now that we have that out of the way here are a number of shots from the premiere and our review of the movie:
Martha: A Picture Story had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this Thursday to an enthusiastic crowd that included big graffiti, Street Art, international press and film industry names, to see the highly anticipated documentary about the venerable photographer Martha Cooper by the Sydney director Selina Miles.
Included in the crowd were old-skool New Yorkers and a large international contingent of folks like Henry Chalfant, Doze Green, Skeme, Lee Quinones, Soten1, Carlos Mare 139, Terror 161, Kane, Dink (Baltimore), Okuda San Miguel (Spain), Faith47 (Los Angeles), Mantra (France), 1UP Crew (Germany), Nika Kramer (Germany), Roger Gastman, Lars Pederson (Denmark), Ian Cox (UK), Dean Moses… and many more. Those who didn’t attend this screening are having the opportunity to see it at three more sold-out evenings over the course of the festival.
The electricity was in the air as Director Miles and producer Daniel Joyce along with the just-arrived Australian members of the “Martha” crew looked for their seats in the Village East Cinema. After a brief introduction by Miles, who told the audience that the film had been a great pleasure to make, the curtain went up to reveal the mother of the superstar art twins Os Gemeos on the big screen. She is sitting at her kitchen table in São Paulo remarking how her boys used to draw on everything, including fruit, and how Cooper and Chalfant’s 1984 book “Subway Art” changed their lives forever. With their story as a backbone for the film, the theme of personal transformation is repeated in a hundred large and small ways for the next hour and twenty minutes.
Spanning nearly all of Ms. Cooper’s 75 years, including a photo at age 3 with a camera in hand from her father Ben and uncle Harry’s Baltimore camera store, “Martha” successfully identifies the underlying driving forces, the unique personality and intellectual traits, and the milestones that propelled the photographer across scenes, subcultures, cities, and continents.
While Cooper is most often identified as a crucial documentarian of the 1970s and early 1980s graffiti-writing scene in New York, with “Subway Art” considered a global holy book of preservation that inspired thousands of artists worldwide, the film is judiciously clear that the photographer has had an anthropologists’ zeal for documenting much more over her multi-decade career.
During and after the film you don’t know who you are most impressed with – the director, Martha, the communities touched, the history and stories that are preserved with such care and respect.
“Martha” captures important and character-molding biographical events – like her work in the Peace Corps in Thailand, a subsequent motorcycle trip from there to the UK, her investigations of tattoo techniques in Tokyo, and her work as the first “girl” photographer at the New York Post. During the film’s nearly magical depiction of Cooper’s first meeting with New York graffiti king Dondi, those in the audience who knew this story broke out into spontaneous applause.
The film isn’t shy about the low points and struggles of Cooper, like her repeated attempts to work at National Geographic, the continuous rejections of “Subway Art” by publishers, her loss of money by its initial disappointing sales, and the high-sniffing artworld classism of a clueless gallerist who unsuccessfully tries to dash her hopes of being recognized for her truest and most human work.
You are gently led to take that journey with great interest as well, finally arriving at the mid-2000s European promotional tour for her book Hip Hop Files where Cooper suddenly realizes the impact that “Subway Art” has had on graffiti artists worldwide. Building on that enthusiastic response from new-found fans of her work she jumps back into street photography just as the Street Art scene is exploding.
Despite such a complex story Miles is able to coax out many significant truths in character development along with their infinite shadings, facts and nuances of the story.
With interviews, testimonials, unseen home footage from Cooper’s ex-husband and excerpts from soft-news TV stories of the 1980s, viewers may gain a greater understanding of the sacrifice, dogged determination, and her sixth sense for capturing images that the subject exhibits. Keeping a quick pace aided by a smart soundtrack, pertinent graphic elements, and sharp editing, Miles finds ingenious ways to educate us about the various milieu Cooper worked with and the vicissitudes she had to overcome.
The additional layers of visual language infuse so many aspects of the story – a collaging of words, music, precise editing, intuitive pairings and lyrical, witty storytelling that lands in a pitch-perfect way.
In the end you realize Coopers’ underlying credo of taking pictures is about shedding light on people, their lives, their amazing ingenuity in the face of difficulty, their ability to rise above their environment as well as the artists techniques of art-making.
Careful observers will also be struck by the scenes of quiet moments that remain still for a few seconds to reveal deeper feeling – a remarkable glimpse of the filmmaker’s intuitive grasp of the life path and its trials. It’s those in-between places of luminosity that are revelatory, and the human gestures she lets the camera linger upon allow the viewer to write small essays inside their head, bearing witness.
With gratitude and respect to Director Miles and her whole film crew whom have worked thousands of hours over the past 2 and half years, we know that the graffiti/Street Art/photography scenes have been given a huge gift; almost as big a gift as Martha herself.
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BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
