Little Miss Foofoonette, 2017

Gum  

Gum (born 1976) is a rising artist on the French Street Art scene. From Paris to Brussels via Lyon, Biarritz, Brussels, Geneva and of course Montpellier, his adopted city, Gum has around thirty exhibitions to his credit. Winner of the Biennale of Young European Designers in Naples in 2005, he also had the opportunity to collaborate with Philippe Starck for a furniture collection or to exhibit alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat in Geneva. Plastic is the central point of his artistic approach and the common thread of his favorite themes: advertising, consumption and overconsumption, sex ... Through his paintings, Gum redefines the prefabricated codes of a dying society . "The Titanic syndrome", as he calls it, is denounced very lightly through his works: "We continue to polish the chandeliers of the boat that is sinking, we are attracted by all that is" Bling Bling », All that glitters, which is inflatable, which flies away, while the bombs fall on our face! ". ? The absurdity of the “disposable” and the pre-chewed and pre-cut everything pushes this artist with Peter Pan syndrome to draw for children and to address adults. These 2 worlds merge so much that it becomes anxiety-provoking. “Young people want to get old and old people want to get young. There are sweets that look like drugs, and the drugs seem like sweets ”- Gum talks about the loss of bearings, where no one finds his place, in a society of overconsumption sanitized, indigestible, where the stupidity of general consciousness makes us amorphous. His art is his way of describing and denouncing a world where "nothing is right". Torn between man and child, the 42-year-old artist evolves in this bipolarity and as his only resistance to this world he does not understand is to refuse to grow up: his hymn becomes “Fuck Growing Up! ".