Les somnambules, 2020

Carlitho  

Born in 1970, the artist Carlitho lives in Paris, which he explores from an early age, both through his day and night wanderings and through his moves. From Buttes-Chaumont to rue du Commerce, from Quai de Jemmapes to rue Francoeur, from rue Blanche to Saint-Sulpice, he intimately knows the city, which flows through his veins and continues to fascinate him with its intertwined streets, popular buttes, its detuned bridges. A lawyer during working hours, he becomes a cat as soon as the opportunity arises, scaling scaffolding, tattooing colorful umbrellas on the top of chimneys, hopping on the urban canopy with a bomb in his hand.

Carlitho has devoted himself for twenty years to photography, to capture unusual or poetic scenes, capturing a moment of eternity, a timeless situation, a synchronicity. As if the world presented itself to him with his own will, in a precise framework, in a singular form, and invited him to seize his composition in movement. Alternating between black and white and color, he tracks down the detail that will give the true meaning of the photograph or subtly modify its apparent meaning: a lamppost that nestles at the top of a tree trunk, a rider that the against the light and the dark background of the forest makes disappear but whose shadow is visible above the horse, the intersection of two trees forming an imaginary tent above two children returned to the wild life or to the tender childhood. It celebrates the beauty of a landscape and the possibility of a finally harmonious human presence in the world.

In 2014, he joined the urban art collective “Le Mouvement”, founded by Riks, Romano and Tiez. Together, they invite to take a step towards the celebration of diversity and advocate, through works such as "Umbrellas", the richness of diversity and encounters. These photographic collages, displayed in the street, create a link between the subjects and passers-by. Also taking advantage of professional getaways, Carlitho poses these collages in Tokyo and New-York and participates with the Movement in the Urban Art Fair (Paris, New-York) or in operations abroad.

He also participates in the production of works by Romano: a fresco on the wall of the first refugee reception center at Porte de la Chapelle, a portrait of Jean Gabin with an unknown woman in the Harcourt route at the Point éphémère, performance during the inauguration of the Power & Love tramway in Hong-Kong, fresco on the Auxerre quays.

In 2017, he disseminated his work “Make Trump russian again” all over Paris, ironically evoking the genesis of this electoral nightmare. The technique, hybrid, combines collage and stencil in different formats. If the motifs are the same (the political message), the work is each time unique by the choice of the colors of the lettering and the background, decided at the last moment according to the urban support.