Maxime Drouet French, b. 1980

A wild child of freight graffiti born in 1980, Maxime Drouet was arrested in 2011. His lawyer put him on other tracks, those leading to exhibition spaces and art market. Graffiti artist, photographer, archivist, Maxime Drouet has a tenacious personality and a true artistic vision, which is why Martha Cooper has admired and supported his work since the beginning. When he makes a whole car and extracts a car window from it, he breaks up his painted work, the abstraction here becoming the ghostly reflection of a past action, a trace of a whole work, and generating a second work with evocative power. Similarly, when he takes a photograph from a train car, his graffiti is no longer visible or legible, and the work that emerges is of a random composition. By taking his work out of context, the artist challenges the highly coded language of graffiti. The letter is deconstructed, the graffiti is put to death. The erased moment is the one that emphasizes the moment of grace when the painting is done, the moment before, the one that no longer exists outside the photo.

Maxime Drouet's work conveys a permanent duality: between inside and outside, shadow and light, day and night, illegality and legality, anonymity and fame. Everything here is in the making and in the process of becoming, for Maxime Drouet's expressive palette is wide and his obsessions will always be a source of discovery. The Chenus Longhi Gallery has realised two personnal exhibitions in 2018 and 2020.