Swimming pool, 2023

Meleo  

Gabriel Girerd aka "Méléo" born in 1978, is a graffiti artist from Roanne. It was during a trip to Czechoslovakia, when he was a child, that he discovered the walls covered with graffiti, revealing to him a new panorama, new angles of view, drawing, painting, illustration and l street art were already taking hold of him. He produced his first pieces in 1997, the year he met Rézine, both students at the same art school in Lyon. Together, they will explore industrial wastelands, disused factories, places of no-man's land, far from sight, in search of blank walls, walls that tell a story. Strongly influenced by "writing" and "lettering" in his early days, he gradually moved towards the composition of characters with rich and varied influences.

The 2000s will mark his desire to always go further alongside his friend "Rézine" and Estelle alias "Molusk", together they will explore France from north to south, as well as the major European capitals, Geneva, Lausanne, Brussels. , Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona... and much further afield...Bangkok, Beijing, Shanghai, Canton, Yangshuo. In 2005, Gabriel founded the collective "We Are The Robot" and created with Molusk, their own alternative screen printing workshop opening the way to an activist and corrosive street art, a parenthesis playing on the city in its every corner.

He collaborated from 2007 to 2012 with the Jarring Effects label, linking projects with emerging artists and international artists, creating posters and other album covers (High Tone, Filastine, Jiang Liang Sound, Rdug). This return to his original profession, graphic design, really allows him to focus on street art and he will exploit its flaws, he invests in the supports neglected by traditional graffiti artists, an important development because it will have made it possible to introduce a part of the message in these ephemeral works.

In 2012, he returned to his first passions, urban exploration, and the discovery of virgin spots, rediscovering this soul of explorers, capturing moments, atmospheres and painting...painting and initiating environmental, social and political issues art.

Having perfectly integrated the origins of graffiti to make it mutate, he reinvents tools and techniques, appropriating new media, seeking new influences and other themes, hitherto unexplored.

Thus, he freed himself from the folklore of the 90s. Since then, he has been working on commissioned murals, linking collaborations and partnerships with institutional and social actors in the city of Roanne. He founded the Ripped Paper collective in 2016 with visual artist Alain Bernard. They have the idea of not having one style but, on the contrary, of juggling with a multitude, like alchemists, devoting an important part to reflection and the development of new technical processes.

His work is valued for its originality and creativity, as well as its commitment to sustainability and social awareness. 2021, Gabriel Girerd will be honored to be entrusted with the realization, by the town hall of Le Coteau, of the fresco in tribute to the starred chef Pierre Troisgros.

In two decades, the muralist has known everything, or almost, of this environment that fuels all fantasies. The brambles and barriers that had to be crossed, the walls that had to be climbed to find the right spots. Fast sessions along railway lines, disused factories, and the discovery of a world of chaos delivering sections of dilapidated, tagged, marked walls, walls that tell a story often linked to that of men. Sometimes gloomy atmosphere, apocalyptic atmosphere, this feeling of being alone in the world and as if frozen in time, the artist defines himself as a witness to the fall of these concrete giants sleeping on their past, from the end of these colossi to the foot of clay, today, disappeared, swept away, forgotten.

Today, he returns to basics and reinvents the medium, through his urban dioramas, with this industrial universe as an aesthetic, which he treats in an autobiographical and realistic way, by recreating imaginary and anonymous scenes, frozen in time and in space. He plays with the staging, reconstructs, in the manner of a naturalist, playgrounds for artistic creation.

He reinvents the beauty of places where nature takes back its rights, sublimates ugliness, endows each wall with its own identity, its own history, recreates this particular atmosphere of his urban explorations, subtly combining the right balance between history of the wall, graffiti references and its own story.