Can you remind us who you are and your artistic practice?
We are EvaZéSir, Eva & Sir, couple and duo of visual artists. We make paintings (paintings & frescoes) as well as installations in urban space.
What is your background, how did you start creating?
We come from different backgrounds, Eva from the university of plastic arts and teacher of arts, painter of formation begins to create in workshop in small format. In 2008, she met Sir, a self-taught artist, who started with graffiti in disused factories and explored the world of stencils, which became more and more monumental. Eva invites him to create in her studio and Sir proposes street experiments. At the beginning the collaborations are limited to painting, then little by little links with wood, objects, salvaged materials found in the streets allow them to create installations mixing volume, collage relief and painting.
In your daily work as artists, what inspires you? What triggers the creation of a work?
Places, the history of a place inspire us. But also the encounter with an object, an old photo, an old piece of furniture, a board yellowed by time… These obsolete objects bring us back to pieces of life. Lives that we like to imagine and reinvent. Our creations are not only aesthetic, they allow us to pass on messages, to reflect social, ecological, political, or poetic conditions…
Can you explain to us how you build a work? What are the different stages of creation?
Everything starts from an encounter…
If it is a place, we start with a historical research of this one. The history of the place carries us away and inspires us. Whether it is by the passage of inhabitants, or past events. They are the source of our creation. Our goal: to make the place speak.
If it is an object, it will be the starting point to realize the work and the narration. The object having belonged to someone, will be associated with others. The association of several pieces “of life” will lead to a story often very romantic and imagined. Giving a second life to neglected materials is the prerequisite for our studio works and installations.
From the composition of wood and objects to its reappropriation, characters will be born who will inhabit this romance. Their look will give their strength and will reflect their personality, see their thought. Nostalgia, materials, the passing of time, memory are our constituent parts and the main mediums of our creation.