The emblematic blue cat created by urban artist Christian Guémy, aka C215, which can be found on a monumental fresco in Paris, at the corner of Rue Nationale and Boulevard Vincent Auriol, is on the cover of his latest book, The World of C215. The Art of the Street Stencil to be published October 12 by Gründ. Much has happened since 2015 and the publication of his sumptuous latest monograph (C215. La Monographie, Albin Michel)…
Christian Guémy, born in 1973 in Bondy (Seine-Saint-Denis), painted his first stencils on the walls of Paris in 2006 and has since put away his bombs only during new forays into sculpture, stained glass or video mapping. Very colorful, his portraits with an instantly recognizable style catch the eye. It’s difficult not to start by evoking this very emotional moment of the artist’s tribute, in Le Monde de C215, to his mother: “On January 8, 1979, my mother, Patricia Bonnefon, aged 18, died. committed suicide by throwing herself from the 8th floor of a tower in Pantin, when I was only or already 5 years old. His short life was nothing but a series of disappointments.
At the age of 12 she became pregnant, and the child who was going to be born (…) was first intended for public assistance and then entrusted to her own mother, my grandmother Micheline [represented on one of the stamps in the Carnet de la Croix -Red]. Idealistic and sentimental, several disappointments in love and a life on the wrong track pushed her to throw herself out of the window, leaving a note behind which she concluded with: “Tell Christian that I love him. Excuse me.” Every year for me there is January 8th. In memory of Patricia, forty years ago, January 8, 1979. You are forgiven. I love you too “. A portrait matched by that of “Kiki”, Christian, since that is what “[he] was called throughout [his] childhood”, C215 revealing himself in bits and pieces, surrounded by his children Gabin and Malou and her bulldog Lili.
Back to something “lighter”…
“It seems to me more and more that I am an artist looking to the past, an artist of nostalgia. Creating stamps has been of particular importance to me, because I have painted on mailboxes so often, of course, but also because these miniature works of art are traces of a world that is disappearing. »
Postage stamps therefore have their place in Le Monde de C215. The art of street stencils, with his portraits of Doctor Jean Sapin-Jaloustre (2018) and Paul-Emile Victor (2020) for the French Southern and Antarctic Lands and, for France, of Léo Ferré (2016), Nelson Mandela (2023), without forgetting his “Street Dance” stamp (Stamp Festival 2014) – compared to a photo of the original urban work – and his notebook for the French Red Cross (2019). Ten years of philatelic creations, already.
“I like what disappears, fades away”
Beyond what separates them, stamp and urban art come together in the destruction that awaits them: “What I like about stamp, explains Christian Guémy, is to create a work of art in miniature, an object quality editing. There is significant know-how in the French stamp, France prints stamps for the whole world. But above all, the idea of creating works that are in danger of disappearing. I like what disappears, fades away. The paper stamp is in danger.”
In this book designed as a retrospective alphabet book, from A (“Lovers”, a recurring theme) to Z (“Zaporogue”, in reference to Ukraine), where the chapter devoted to “stamps” is therefore sandwiched between ” Star Wars” and “Tirailleurs”, the artist reveals himself and delivers the keys to his messages, where great figures of French history rub shoulders (chapters “Pantheon, “Resistance”, etc.), tributes to modern heroes ( “Saint-Exupéry”, “Panthéon”, etc.), and testimonies of his commitments. It is therefore not so surprising to find Mandela and the Red Cross on stamps.
In 2015, his alphabet book took the reader to Haiti, Morocco, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Marseille and Istanbul.
Since then, among other things, Christian Guémy has visited Ukraine four times since Russia’s invasion of the country on February 24, 2022, after traveling to Rwanda in 2015 to “take portraits of the Righteous, of saviors.” , “that is to say the Hutus who, at the risk of their lives, during the genocide, took the risk of saving Tutsis or mixed couples”.
From one volume to another, prisons, “Charlie” or Haiti always have a voice, with a renewed iconography.
Post office boxes could not fail to be always present in this monograph: “In public space, I quickly appropriated a type of urban furniture that is unfortunately destined to disappear, the post office box. Places of correspondence and passage, street post boxes are today one of the symbols of my work. Several of my painted mailboxes are in public collections and my collaborations with the Post Office have been numerous. We will later see these mailboxes as relics of a blessed time when people wrote each other love letters and happy cards (…)”, analyzes C215, a bit nostalgic. In 2015, he wrote, in a chapter entitled “Post”: “The mailboxes that I pass while walking give me, each time, the effect of an invitation to travel”…
And in 2023, stamps containing its contents took over!…
Worse this last volume? The memory of his mother and certain chapters set the tone: “Army”, “Covid”, “Mourning”, “Pollutions”, “Resistance”, “Rwanda”, “Shoah”, “Tirailleurs”, “Ukraine”, “Aging »…
“I prefer to listen”
A pessimism, a melancholy that we find in his Little Vagabond Poems (Le Temps des Cerises, 2018) where the colors of the illustrations compensate for a certain darkness of the texts.
And “Pray” allows him to specify that “a significant part of [his] work, discreet but regular, never proselytizing, relates to faith and hope.”
A “hope” evidenced by the recent Nuit de Lumière. Hope according to Charles Péguy (Kiwi, 2022). Christian Guémy explains in this volume that “Péguy entered [his] life at [his] 7 years old, in a school that bore his name (…)”. He then evokes the Porch of the mystery of the second virtue, and “the passages on Hope which particularly marked [him]”. To later become a Christian. “Almost by accident, but that’s just me. » A faith that led him to the Saint-Jean-des-Vignes abbey in Soissons (Aisne). “One of the first provincial towns which took the gamble of giving me carte blanche to adorn its streets with portraits of illustrious citizens (…). I had been there and left a work on the arsenal. I made friends there, so much so that I came back to paint there many times. All my portraits remained untouched there. »
So, C215 committed artist?
In C215. Justice in Rwanda (Critères Editions, 2015), responding to Benjamin Abtan and Sylvie Coma, he wishes to clarify: “No, I am very wary of these stories. There are so many committed pseudo-artists who are outraged by everything and anything, but who actually do nothing (…). I prefer to listen, watch and only intervene when I think I can do something.”
He says nothing else, ultimately, in Le Monde de C215. “To a journalist who asked me why I decided to come to Kiev, I replied: ‘It was my works that decided, for them to talk about the war in Ukraine they had to be made here, in this context, in this desolation, it is my works which decide and choose me, so I had no choice”. »
From Rwanda to Ukraine: “In Rwanda, I was more into the idea of reconciliation, twenty years after the genocide.” But even if the two approaches are different, “this relates to the genocidal question, where it is a question of population substitution,” he analyzes.
President Zelensky’s video
Its interventions in Ukraine stem from a certain continuity. He says he was coming out of an exhibition at the Museum of the Order of the Liberation, on the theme of resistance, “and the invasion of Ukraine resonated. The initial idea was to welcome Ukrainian refugees. I first painted a large wall in Paris, with the character of Chiara [a portrait of a little French girl painted in 2010], in the colors of Ukraine, yellow and blue, at the beginning of March, rue de Patay, in the 13th arrondissement, to serve as a rallying point for those who could volunteer to welcome refugees.” This is where he meets the team from the Ukrainian embassy. One thing led to another and he found himself on site, with his paint, his stencils and an assistant. First of four trips, with a fifth scheduled for 2024.
Some highlights emerged: a mural in Lviv, a “twin” work of the Parisian fresco; Bouchra, where he paints butterflies and birds, “modest, small, fragile works” on what he can find; a photo exhibition organized in February 2023 at the initiative of the President of the National Assembly, which gave birth to War in Ukraine (Critères Editions, 100 pages, 20 euros); the video of President Zelensky, delivering a speech on the Ukrainian National Independence Day in front of one of his frescoes created in April 2023, representing a national hero, Oleksandr Matsievsky, on a 26 meter high wall of the National Assembly in Kiev…
Along the way, Christian Guémy obtained recognition from institutions: approved painter of the army, medals from the Senate, the National Assembly, the city of Paris (Grand vermeil)… Isn’t it embarrassing for an artist “from the street” to risk being labeled an “official” artist? To this, he responds that if he had not “been institutionalized a little”, he would not have been able to “paint in prisons”.
Paradoxically, in his eyes, “the context has changed. Today, if there is to be an avant-garde, it must be institutional. Creating popular work through institutions seems to me to be deserted by artists today. I make popular works in the sense that people find themselves in my work, whether it is a portrait of Simone Veil, a work in support of the Ukrainians, the victims of Charlie Hebdo… What concerns me more, it is to make a work that makes sense in my time”. As for the risk of too much popularity, “in the political sense of the term”, he responded to the author and exhibition curator Jérôme Catz (Douce France. From Emile Zola to Brigitte Lahaye, Critères Editions, 2014): “ It all depends on what I use it for. Painting Taubira was putting his popularity to good use for useful purposes”…
Among its projects, the Foreign Legion Museum in Aubagne (Bouches-du-Rhône) will host an exhibition in April 2024. C215 plans to open a gallery in Carpentras (Vaucluse) in the spring, a city where an exhibition will also be organized, in June, at Inguimbertine.
Finally, within a few weeks, the Ukrainian post office will issue a stamp bearing the image of a Ukrainian poet, Lesya Ukrainka (1871-1913), based on a portrait painted at the Ukrainian embassy in February 2023.