Projection & Talk · La ruée vers VLP (Vive La Peinture)

Founded in 1983, VLP (Vive La Peinture) has been one of the pioneers of French urban art for 40 years, at the heart of the ‘graffiti movement’ that made France one of the great punk centres of European street art in the 1980s. The screening of the documentary film La ruée vers VLP (35mn), featuring never-before-seen archive footage and interviews with the artists and street art experts such as curator Arnaud Oliveux and philosopher Christophe Genin, is an opportunity to look back at the career of the founders of VLP and discuss it with them afterwards, while celebrating their forty years of activity.

Michel Espagnon, Jean Gabaret and Martial Jalabert, these three young Parisian painters full of utopia, met in the catacombs, on the hoardings of Les Halles and on the walls of Paris, using brushes, stencils, collages and even chainsaws! The film’s title is a nod to “La ruée vers l’art”, one of the first events to put the spotlight on urban art, which took off in the 1980s. The film explores the festive, libertarian and anti-establishment ideals that drove the VLPs at the time, as well as part of the urban scene, which we also rediscover through the images: their accomplices and friends, Jérôme Mesnager, Speedy Graphito, Jef Aérosol, Blek le rat, Miss Tic, Paella Chimicos, Psychose, Jean Faucheur and many others.

VLP, which became a duo in the 1990s, is the only group in existence to have formed an entirely new, fusionist style from a number of individuals. It is also the only group to have so closely linked music, performance and painting, in delirious syncretisms at the heart of the most electrifying Parisian and German clubs. A Germany whose intimate links with French street-art are being rediscovered on this occasion. We also see them in their first televisions, at a time when the media did not yet understand the phenomenon of street art, and its various names, “urban baroque painting”, “graffiti movement” or “picturo-graffiti”…

Since the 2000s, VLP has continued to produce collages and performances based around the character of Zuman, as well as large-scale frescoes such as their famous wall near Beaubourg, “Ceci n’est pas un graffiti”, which is one of the most photographed in Paris. VLP has not only made the history of the movement, but has also participated in its transformation towards digital technology and social networks, with the aim of sharing more and more. Finally, the interviews with Jean and Michel reveal a deep and fascinating reflection on the place of the graffiti movement in contemporary art, between free figuration, bad painting, lettering, tagging and illustration, and between vandalism and the market.

The evening is hosted by filmmaker Jim Gabaret, who previously directed the Arte series Ceci n’est pas un graffiti in 2016. He offers an “insider’s” look at this sometimes little-known period in the history of the 1980s, when the punk, rock and hip-hop effervescence fuelled painting and gave rise to a major international movement, at the root of what is now known as “street art”. The film, originally made in 2021 to coincide with the Libre Figuration exhibition at the Musée des beaux-arts and the Cité de la dentelle et de la mode in Calais in association with the Fonds Hélène & Édouard Leclerc pour la Culture, also provides an insight into some of the links between the group VLP, and through them the graffiti movement, with the Figuration Libre of Blanchard, Boisrond, Combas, Hervé and Richard Di Rosa, Catherine Viollet, the Musulmans Fumants and the Frères Ripoulin, the American Graffiti of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, and the Neue Wilde Malerei in Germany.

An essential history for all street-art fans!

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