Poesie Urbaine, 2024

Jérôme Mesnager   Best sellers Famous Artists

Poesie Urbaine is a unique work built on a simple and radical idea: the canvas is cut in two. The upper half is the wall; the lower half, the sky.

Across it, Lasveguix deploys his full vocabulary as a poster artist. In the upper section, the papers accumulate in relief: lacerated, torn, layered posters whose fibres lift and crumple into a genuine geography of matter. can be read in white letters on a black ground; the yellow Fondation Louis Vuitton poster devoted to Basquiat is recognisable, his screen-printed portrait in fluorescent pink struck through with a large black cross; and the ghosts of the Velvet Underground surface alongside mentions of , of Richard, of Amsterdam. Deep blues, acid yellows, oranges and off-whites compose a dense, fragmented frieze with jagged edges, like a cliff made of paper. This is the living memory of a street wall, saturated with names, announcements and images that cover one another over without ever quite disappearing.

Below, everything stops. A vast flat expanse of turquoise blue, applied directly to the canvas whose weave remains visible, opens up a space of silence. And it is here that Jérôme Mesnager intervenes: his (White Man), drawn in a few broad brushstrokes, stands with arms raised upwards — towards that chaos of papers, or perhaps towards the light. Born in 1983 on the streets of Paris, this luminous, anonymous silhouette has become one of the great icons of French urban art. Here it is no longer on the wall: it has stepped out of it. The gesture of the open arms speaks of momentum, of breath, of release.

The whole work rests on that contrast: density against emptiness, noise against calm, the collective against the individual. A composition of great graphic elegance, in which two generations of the urban scene agree on a single word — poetry.