A closer look at Rero's creative process
Can you tell us a little about yourself and your artistic practice?
I'd like to borrow a quote from Nisargadatta Maharaj to answer your question: "You don't need to know what you are, you just need to know what you're not". But if I have to describe my practice and my background, I'd say that I'm a human being who signs his various interventions under the pseudonym RERO. I intervene mainly in public spaces, both natural and urban, because my identity is made up of both, and I try to balance them in my work, as in my life.
I also particularly enjoy hijacking different media or contexts in order to question them. I intervene in an almost systematic way, which over time has become my way of decoding and digesting the world. This is done using letters written in Verdana font, which I then cross out or connect to question their reading and create a polysemy of interpretations once the words have been installed in situ.
What is your background and how did you get into design?
My first artistic act was through graffiti. There was too great a gap between "classical" art, which I felt was inaccessible, and contemporary art, which I felt was too elitist. I simply hadn't studied their respective codes, which would have allowed me to appreciate them. Graffiti offered me a more direct, frontal access, enabling me to bridge the gap and express myself. And I didn't need to know everything about it to be satisfied.
It allowed me to set more affordable goals. Paradoxically, and despite its prohibition, it offered me a more spontaneous gateway. Experience was enough to build my language and my identity. It was my first love, and the one that gave birth to my desire to interact with reality, to take part in our world. Curiously, I had the feeling that you had to transgress the current codes of art to be able to carry out a creative act. It was as if the art classes at school were out of step with the times, that the way artworks were presented to us was archaic and had little to do with my everyday life. So, naturally, I began to practice graffiti in a very conventional way, reproducing American imagery and style. Alabama Monroe could tell you as much about his disillusionment with the American dream. The more I tried my hand at graffiti, the more I felt I was mimicking an era in New York that no longer existed, and in which I had never even participated. A kind of ghost train I was trying to run behind. It was an illusion, but the energy that came out of this movement gave me my first taste of art and gave birth to this desire to interact with my environment and reality.
In your day-to-day work as an artist, what inspires you? What triggers the creation of a work?
I would simply say words. I use words because they resonate with everyone, you don't need to have studied anything in particular to be moved or repelled by them. They speak to everyone, and everyone can interpret them as they wish, which is also their limit, and that's what interests me about crossing them out. I like to question them, because they take on a whole new meaning in a particular context. I've started systematically crossing out all my messages.
This black line, discreet at first, as it was probably ill-assumed, has thickened with time, to become today my signature, my way of decoding the world in which I live, of better interpreting it. I had found my language, my way of deciphering the sensations I had about our times. Trying to reveal the things we don't see. Above all, this thick bar allows me to propose a polysemic work, rather than confining the reading of this proposition to a single way. It allows me to ask a question to which I don't necessarily have the answer. It offers the passer-by or visitor the right to ask the question. This negation can be interpreted in several ways. It can underline the word, as Jean-Michel Basquiat did: "I cross out words so that they are more visible. The fact that they're crossed out makes you want to read them."
It can signal a contradiction, an oxymoron, an idea that was true for me at one point, but which made its way through the process, only to turn out to be completely false, but which it was necessary to translate plastically in order to realize this error and mark a break linked to this change. This line questions the notion of self-censorship. An idea that we think cannot be expressed in a particular context. It allows me to hide behind this barrier to express things I probably wouldn't have dared to express without it. It helps me to commit. This erasure also warns us against the poison of words, in the manner of Joseph Kosuth or Ben: "We must beware of words". This line symbolizes the limit not to be crossed, but also the horizon...
Can you explain how you go about creating your work? What are the different stages of creation?
As much as my intervention process may seem very "codified" or even protocol-based, once you've found your own way of expressing yourself and expressing your questions about the world, you stick to it. As I said, it's my way of digesting and questioning my era. On the other hand, the source or essence that triggers my act can vary greatly.
My act can be triggered by a particular context, a real or virtual exploration, the encounter of a medium, the meeting of a person, a conversation in the public or private space, a sensation or even a simple word. Borders, like sources, are relatively porous in my mind, and art is everywhere, especially where you least expect it. What links all my interventions, I'd say, is the question of misappropriation and reappropriation. For example, today it's difficult for me to work on a white canvas that's intrinsically designed to hold a painting. My whole approach consists in hijacking contexts, reusing objects and supports to offer them a new interpretation. That's why I work on old books, telephone covers, old newspapers, mailboxes and all kinds of supports such as wood, steel and fabric. I try to reappropriate a medium that already exists and question it through my intervention. To do this, I try to apply in my work a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who says that perfection is reached, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.