1970

2023

50 YEARS OF GRAFFITI AND SIGNS

Déclic or the evolution of Signs

Lulled from an early age by an artistic environment and a passion for contemporary art, he very quickly embarked on an artistic path. It was in the mid-80s that he discovered the graffiti movement arriving from New York. It’s the Déclic (the origin of his artist’s name)! By day, he was a student at the Beaux-Arts, but by night he painted the walls of La Rochelle, Poitiers, Toulouse, Montpellier, Bordeaux and many other cities. At the same time, he was inspired by artists such as Richard Serra, Pierre Soulages, Yves Klein, Jackson Pollock, Jean Michel Basquiat and many others… Having come through the end of the 2000s with desire and passion, he is now approaching the 21st century as an attentive observer of cultural, societal and behavioural changes, to the point of noting the polishing of graffiti into “Street Art”.

His work today is a raw synthesis of the history of graffiti from its origins and the evolution of the times it has lived through to the present day, all mixed with a personal perception of the structural and lasting evolution of his contemporaries. Convinced that a truly new “Post Graffiti” era is in the making, he returns as a player to try and shed new light on this mix of Art, Urban, Message and quest for visibility. At the origins of graffiti in the 70s in the United States, there was the name, the signature, the “Tag” with the sole desire to be seen and to “propagate” this name, as much as possible and as visibly as possible. Walls, trains, underground trains, very quickly the saturation imposes itself and makes illegible the attempts of each one to exist.

The D as a symbol, a label

Today, half a century later, violence and visual saturation are everywhere (graffiti, advertising, television, internet, etc.) and the need to exist is even greater. By creating a strong identity symbolised by a D in a circle (the first letter of Déclic), in analogy with the well-known Copyright, Déclic is seeking to impose a brand, a label, as the culmination of the graffiti concept. This “D” then becomes the symbol for labelling a space, a place or a work of art, a sign that stands out from all the others by its simplicity and effectiveness. The brand that supersedes all others, a perfect metaphor for graffiti and the age of excess we live in !

To mark the 300th anniversary of the Porte Royale, Déclic decided to create an artistic bridge between the graffiti of the convicts at the Porte Royale and today’s urban graffiti.

By playing with the different materials that make up the gate – metal, stone, wood and gold – Déclic offers us food for thought !