Marilyn Brands, 2022

Brain Roy  

BRAIN ROY (MR & ROY)

Born in Lyon in 1980, BRAIN ROY discovered graffiti in the early 2000s through wall claims in the city of Lyon.

This flash had a driving effect that has never left him and that he took with him like a precious piece of luggage to Paris, where he settled in 2000.

He immediately plunges into the hip-hop movement, turns to his most demanding discipline as a Graffiti artist: graffiti.

His tags and throw-ups made in the underground arteries of the Paris Metro are a benchmark, powerful, aggressive, committed, whether personal or collective gestures, made with his group MR & ROY.

His name is omnipresent on strategic lines 5, 10 and 13, which earned him the title of “King of subway".

With his experience as an activist resulting from various ideological battles to which he contributed in a quest for increased identity, carried by the city, its human diversity and its creative power, he quickly became a major figure in the GRAFF movement.

This culture is in him. In the past as in the present.

BRAIN ROY continues its transhumance with relentlessness on various supports, in various places of France and Europe, from the graffiti festival to the vacant lot.

His leitmotiv: to develop his mural work.

The characters, signs, traces, marked and superimposed in stratification, creating volumes of matter, evoke a boiling volcano from which springs a magma of colors.

These mixed, opposed, associated colors, the abundance of which covers the walls of the capital and the wasteland of its periphery, make him a full colorist within the first generation of French graffiti artists. During this period of intense creativity, he formed ROYANDCO, a collective of renowned Parisian artists; a group whose vocation was above all to spread the culture of Street art and its art beyond the borders of the underground.

Brain Roy experiments without taboos, questioning the historical origins of his art.

In 2002, ROYANDCO dissolved and Nicolas ROY gradually moved from the wall to the canvas, to develop a deeply singular writing, where consciously expressive forms echo the evils of our world, while cultivating references to the cultural and political dimension of graffiti. . BRAIN ROY will take a very close interest in all the trends of Streets Art, on which he feeds avidly, and which he mixes with his cultural references and his previous experiences. He will gradually demonstrate the emancipatory impact that graffiti can play on the notion of individualism.

Graffiti is the artistic experience that he sought to develop in a reflection on the Parisian way of life: how did the culture of graffiti originate in France at the beginning of the 80s and more particularly in Paris? What use did we make of it, do we make it?

Brain Roy gradually creates more complex works, canvases and objects not clearly identified, but which still retain this spontaneity, this sensitivity and this controversy specific to the street. Its strength of character is expressed through bursts of color in order to deepen its sensations, sensitivity and emotion.

From his work, we retain the spontaneity, the vindictive spirit and rhythmic vibrations, as echoing contemporary American music.

His paintings and installations remain resolutely in touch with human and social realities, drawing inspiration from themes and significant events of current society. They carry the New York identity but also that of a multicultural France. The work fascinates by this double desire to represent the exterior, the street, the world and the imagination.