Jérôme Mesnager & Adey

JEROME MESNAGER

Jérôme Mesnager entered the Boulle school in 1974 where he trained as a cabinetmaker and where he later taught. In 1979, he took comic strip lessons from Yves Got and Georges Pichard, professors at the Duperré School of Applied Arts.

He is one of the founders, in 1982, of Zig-Zag, a group of about ten very young artists who decide to occupy the street by drawing graffiti and, also, to occupy briefly, the time of an artistic performance, abandoned factories.

On January 16, 1983, he invented the Man in White, “a symbol of light, strength and peace". This white silhouette Jérôme Mesnager has reproduced throughout the world, from the walls of Paris to the Chinese wall.

In 1990, Jérôme Mesnager left his childhood home, the place where he met Jean-Pierre Le Boul'ch, the headquarters of his associations, the studio of his first works, to move to the 20th arrondissement of Paris. He will exhibit a series of palisades on the theme of combat at the Loft gallery, which publishes a catalogue.

In 1995, he produced a large mural on rue de Ménilmontant, in the 20th century, “It's us the guys from Ménilmontant".

Jérôme Mesnager is often associated with Nemo, whose fetish character is the black silhouette of a man in a raincoat wearing a hat. As such, he accompanied the Parisian urban art movement (Blek le rat, Miss.Tic, Jef Aérosol, Némo, etc.) and Figuration Libre in the early 1980s.

40 years of the White Corps in 2023.

ADEY

Adelyne Yvetot, alias Adey, is a French stencil artist from Caen. She studied for a year at the Beaux-Arts in Caen then decided to go freelance. She then began to work with associations. Hands-on, she explores the worlds of drawing, painting, collage and papier mâché before finally blossoming in stencils. She met the urban artist Pierre-Benoît Dumont, better known by his pseudonym Artiste-Ouvrier. The latter introduced her to the Working Class Artist (WCA), who carries out numerous artistic projects and of which she is now an active member. Adey is one of the founders of the Association de Préfiguration et d'Expérimentation d'une Fabrique d'Initiative Municipale, which aims to promote culture and artistic experimentation in the city of Caen by participating in the creation of multidisciplinary artistic residencies. Influenced by street art, she uses her stencils according to her desires, inspired by places or atmospheres. She tries to fight against the static side of the image, and in this sense, her stencils allow her to create an illusion of movement, an illusion of action. Adey makes extensive use of colors, which allow him to breathe vitality and softness into his creations. Always with the aim of solving the problem of the fixed image, she works a lot on the "scenography of the image", by multiplying the projects of video projections, public performances, theatrical or scenographic. Adey exhibits everywhere in France.