Video by: Sander Lanen
Music by MAYO
Born in Amsterdam in 1967, Niels 'Shoe' Meulman took up graffiti at an early age, painting as early as 1979 and already a recognized star at just 18. In the 80s, he met artists such as DONDI, Rammellzee, Haze, Futura, Bando and Keith Haring, and made his mark on the European art scene by perfecting his technique, going so far as to create a style of writing he called "calligraffiti", which would mark generations of graffiti artists in his wake. Interested in design and graphics as much as in the traditional medium of canvas or installations, Shoe is a jack-of-all-trades who is constantly renewing himself. In 2007, he produced a solo exhibition in Amsterdam, which he presented as the culmination of his fusion of calligraphy and graffiti. He describes his own style as follows: "Directness in the whole, finesse in the details. The right balance between seeing and reading, word and image. I like it when letters, writing and language itself become an image or an abstraction. On the other hand, basic shapes and splashes can become language. That's what my painting is all about.
Through the works in this solo show, Shoe dramatizes the arrogance of capitalism in a neoliberal world where obtaining painting materials is a luxury for many, by driving over expensive cans of paint with a car or carelessly burning freshly painted canvases. This nonchalant attitude is an ironic take on the current socio-economic climate, as much as a thinly veiled critique of today's contemporary art world, often perceived as increasingly elitist. In Shoe's work, the car (a 1992 Buick Park Avenue) is used like a paintbrush, an instrument whose traces create a motif. The car is central to the process and is presented in all its splendor as the obvious source and witness of pictorial signs.
A video of the creation of the canvases, made by the artist's long-time collaborator Sander Lanen, is shown in the exhibition: the car's engine roars, the paint cans are brutally dislocated and pour color onto the white surfaces, which are cut and purged like open wounds. The performative aspect at the heart of this working method recalls the long line of twentieth-century "action painters". From the Catalan artist Antoni Tapiès, who used so-called "poor" materials, to Pollock, who introduced a different form of gesture through his "dripping" technique, to the interactive approach of the Japanese artists of the Gutai movement, the specificity of Shoe's pictorial action explores not only the pictorial residues left on the canvases, but also the spatial aspect of the creative process. Even the burning of the canvases, reminiscent of Alberto Burri's "Combustioni", among others, bears witness to Shoe's attempt to appropriate elements of historical artistic practice and then transpose them into the contemporary. The traces created by the car's wheels can also be seen as a further development in Shoe's practice.
Exhibition at DANYSZ I Paris
2-26 september 2023
Негізгі бет Unmovement by Niels 'Shoe' Meulman
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