A new mural from Rouge Hartley in Paris for the organization Art Azoi. The contemporary figurative painter is attracted to the street, although she didn’t begin with graffiti or street art. Originally from Bordeaux, she brings bright florals to the city using a uniquely blurred view of beauty; romantic, if you prefer. The emotion is here, and you can write the stories.

“For this long passing wall that we imprint on a slope, I tried to think of a sequence shot in painting. Around a still life narration, in which I voluntarily break what we have been taught, passively, to see it fade, I propose here an almost abstract sequence around resilience and free will, and unfolds in the same image the temporality of a destruction or a rebirth depending on the direction of travel.

In a summer when everything is burning I know we are capable of better. It is around my old obsessions that I allow myself to turn here: the echo between our catastrophes, political and ecological or intimate, the temporal palimpsest and the tension of time in painting, and of love.

I leave you with this little manifesto of a lover.

I ask us to be bold in love and brave in lovelessness

I expect you to have the audacity to desire your equal and to renounce making us goddesses before knocking down our mats.

I ask us to have the courage of uncompromising honesty, and the finesse of permeability, to love each other with all the future pasts, the wounds of yesteryear, and the nostalgia for possibilities that have not taken place,

To taste the density of the silences between our words,

And to the thickness of our words that say what they are,

I ask us to be vulnerable and true,

To get rid of courtesies that disempower and detours that disarm

Without strategies and without hatred,

I ask us for tenderness and time and space for the infinity of our constraints, our complexes and our wounds.

I ask us to be able to name our borders and invent more victories there than laziness

I ask us to state instead of humiliate

To leave before reducing our powers to comfortable abodes

To leave us instead of abandoning us

To love us free to be

And to be again

And again

And again” – Rouge

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