Velvet & Zoer: Zone autonome / Perpetuum mobile
As collaborators and friends of long standing, Velvet and Zoer first met while training to be designers. In love with the object and graffiti, they founded the CSX crew. Creative complicity overtook rivalry, and each saw the other as presenting an opportunity to evolve. Sometimes working with two hands, sometimes four, their dialogue helped them to develop an inimitable style within themselves. At their exhibitions, Zone Autonome and Perpetuum Mobile, they compare and contrast their respective viewpoints and manners of working, in a kind of tribute to a collaboration which is only just beginning to take shape.
Velvet
Velvet belongs to a tradition of painting that advocates slow, measured strokes and the primacy of the image. This young artist came from a graffiti background and discovered painting in 2000. From the beginning, he chose not to be confined to one medium or one technique. Alternating between flamboyant wildstyles on walls and meticulous watercolours on paper, he soon stood out among his peers. He distinguished himself through his careful construction of letters and his sense of eclecticism.
At his Zone Autonome show, he invites us to rearrange a world divided between industrialisation and skill. To this end, he subverts, borrows and assembles objects which are almost obsolete. While he paints in a classical style, he does not forget his contemporaries. Influenced by Gerhard Richter and Arman, Velvet creates still life pictures and landscapes to portray a manufactured world in contrasting stages: a fantasised past and an almost disappointing present. His highly narrative style of painting tells the first words of the story, inviting the viewer to guess the ending. Dreams and disenchantment, rhythm and immutability, reality and fantasy are the concepts that underlie his work. Velvet combines his most intimate memories with careful observation of his surroundings to build a world full of contradictions, questioning humankind, form and object.
Zoer
The quest for meaning is at the heart of Zoer's work. This keen observer intervenes, interprets and captures reality to better penetrate it. His personal vision was evident in his drawings from a young age. At age 5, he spent time in breaker's yards, drawing traffic jam scenes. Thus he unconsciously began to forge his formal vocabulary. As a teenager, he became familiar with the art of comics. By publishing fanzines, he developed the art of narration. In early 2000, he began to use spray paints on patches of wasteland, displaying an awareness of colour. He was soon noticed for his creative ability and his incorporation of illustration into the art of the letter. Through this practice, he discovered places in limbo, waiting to be given a purpose. He also met people who were marginalised and excluded.
Through Perpetuum Mobile, like a scenario repeating to infinity, we can understand his thoughts about societies and their footprint, about destinies in transition. In the manner of Henri Michaux, he depicts obsolescence and rejection with an almost obsessive sense of detail, to make them visible and understandable. Like an architect, he poetically constructs the picture to reveal and take a politicised look at society, those it leaves behind, abandoned places and their hopes of becoming something. Through a visual language that cultivates paradox - the violence of the subject reasons with the delicacy of the treatment; accuracy justifies disorder; realism sits alongside utopia - he gives the genre scene a contemporary dimension to help understand the habitat of exclusion, or exclusion inhabited.
Texts © Camille Leflon