We had come across the work of Babou and Benjamin Laading in 2010. Their pointillist collaborative paintings focused on reproducing tags on paintings. Instead of just tagging their paintings with a spray can like you might think a graffiti artist would, they took a conceptual approach choosing instead to actually paint the tags using a pointillist technique. The paintings bring about an interesting question about graffiti as art, but not in the normal way you might think. By actually painting a tag the duo is able to comment on the art of a tag working in a traditional fine art medium. We have always talked about language, and the transition for graffiti as art. In their case Babou and Leading are able to make a clear statement in a medium and in the language of the art world. Graffiti artists are also drawn to the work as it is clearly an everyday symbol that we associate with graffiti, the fat cap flare is our version of a Motherwell brush stroke. The tag paintings are clear bridge between the graffiti artist and the art world. We used some old images to give you an idea of their past work.
Babou and Benjamin Leading will be exhibiting together in a new exhibition titled “Magic Dust” at Galerie Florence Leoni. We are excited to see what new ideas and concepts the duo will come up with in this new exhibition.
GF
Exhibition from September 21 to September 23, 2012
Opening Friday, September 21 from 18:30 to 22h
Babou & Benjamin Laading come to realize spatial ScopClub new decor. For this occasion they invest gallery Leoni Florence for 3 days. These two artists worked closely together since three years between music, art and reflection on contemporary urban space!
We also invite you to the inauguration of the new decoration Scop’Club September 21 from 23h to 6h at 5 Avenue de L’Opéra 75001 Paris Metro: Palais Royal or Pyramid
Babou is an iconic figure in street art, graffiti activist in Paris since 1985. Sculptor and urban artist, his practice focuses on the atmosphere and the gesture of the tag.
It explores the social and visual interactions that are created in the twilight urban and reveals
ambiguity in his work to be seen: between desire and malaise. Using city walls
paintings as it seeks to create energy and movement of the street and asks “states
to be “contemporary.
“I am inspired by the distance between civilization and the jungle, reason and abstraction, context and space … I use signs boiling society, and am using this for degradation reconstruction, a recreation. My work deals with the accidental degradation, vandalism, all these forms undesirable and prohibited which disturb the monotony of a working landscape and controlled. pictorial Through process, it invites an outward expression, free, illegal to enter an economic, academic and established. questions It highlights the current-ment on the ambiguous position of the cons-culture system with paradoxical institutionalization of urban art. Aujourd ‘Today, it is considered a criminal offense, punished, and at the same time this act takes an economic value, Promoted. This contrast between illegality and sanctification, the appropriation of the “savage” as a hunting trophy intrigues me. more than an expression of the continuity of urban transferred to canvas, I pro-pose to consider this material and peel. gesture The idea has yet to be apprehended in the rough. I study the subject and treats the distanced objectivity and thoroughness. Different topics that I deal aims to sensitize the public to natural expression, creative potential, issuant have too often repressed image of an internal conflict present in each us between instinct and reason. ” Benjamin Laading.
Galerie Florence Leoni
151, rue Amelot, 75011 Paris
01 43 55 62 94
