The true story of the art of stencil graffiti.

THE MANIFESTO OF STENCILISM

It was on a trip to New York City in 1971 that I saw my first wild art graffiti. They were popping up everywhere : on the subway and around the basketball courts. I remember graffiti painted with a marker, like nervous signatures with a crown, allover NY, and big letters filled with spirals and many colours. These miniatures made me so curious that I asked to Larry Wolhandler, my American friend lodging me in his home in NYC, the inevitable question :

“ What does all this mean ? Why are these people doing this ?”

Unfortunately, nobody could give me a proper answer, except that it was the work of people without any reason or sens of responsability, the « Dusty rabble », said Lindsay, the former mayor of NYC.

In Paris this kind of expression hadn’t emerged at this time. Of course there were a lot of politcal slogans in 1968 during the students riots and of course we discussed « Art in public » through the posters produced in the popular workshops of the « Ecole des Beaux Arts ». But there wasn’t any bigger mouvement of artists determined to investigate urban architecture.

Graffiti, this kind of wild art, was born in the US in the mid-sixties when about ten artists, condemned to anonymity, startet the ball rolling by writing their assumed names on the walls..

I kept all this souvenirs in my mind where they took ten years to mature, then I startet add my bit.
While studying Engraving and Archictecture at the « Ecole des Beaux Arts » in Paris I got acquaint with the subject. So, in the seventies I learned the art of etching and the techniques of lithography and seriography, while the study of architecture waked my conscience for measurable public space.

At the beginning of the seventies I also was very influenced by David Hockney who had had a big exhibition near the Beaux Art School of Paris. And I can say that he did the most impressive work I'd ever seen in my life. The next year he made a movie called "The Bigger Splash" and in this movie Hockney is painting with brushes and oil colour a large caracter of one of his friends on a wall of an apartement. This image never quit my mind. I considered that movie so important for art history that I saw it about ten or fifteen times.