MODERNMURALMAGAZINE_FINALonline

M
athieu, how did
Street art or muralism
changed the
way graffiti used to be?
Is it still possible to achieve
something through this if
you are getting paid to do
it, get the paint and get the
walls?
So, actually, myself, I am, I
was, still some kind of writer,
graffiti writer, but I also used
to do and I still do, let’s
call it European name writing,
not American name
writing graffiti.
That is also my background
and that’s the reason I came
to Name-writing and that I do
not consider myself neither
a street-artist, nor a muralist.
Muralism has kind of a tradition
for me, which is based
on various places on earth.
Here in Portugal we can say
that after the revolution in the
70s there were murals, kind
of a movement of muralism,
which was socially engaged
and it was same in Dublin
and Mexico.
So than you get that muralism
topic that came back
perhaps or some kind of
reminiscence or a loop related
to graffiti and street art.
And it started to appear after
the phase when graffiti went
into decoration, the way municipalities
in the mid 90s to
the mid 2000s did.
Actually graffiti was used
to remove tags from the
city because they knew, they
understood that there was
this kind of scale of respect
that were tags. You got
throw-up, graffiti pieces,
fresco. And when you are
in fresco, supposedly, the
guys are enough respected
from the street, so that
nobody will go over their
fresco. If this is muralism
related to graffiti, this exists
as a form of name writing
graffiti. Then you’ve got that
also that writer, or kind of illustrator,
but acting in the
streets so maybe it would
called street art, but for me
it is muralism.
In France, some were in
Europe doing that kind of
triumph muralism illegal, well
let’s say legal, but it was not
about legal or illegal. It was
about doing painting in spaces
that nobody cared about.
Those were better than
known places, so maybe
because of them or because
of the fact that for example
in 2007 or 2006 BLUE came
to ASALTO Festival in Spain
and started to do a few
murals without permission,
almost without being
invited. He just arrived and
said ‚Hey guys, can I paint
this here?‘ - They said yes. So
it went kind of viral on the
internet, because it was also
the beginning of the Web
2.0, of blogging and social
networks and went beyond
the use that was, some kind
of underground.
Then with Facebook and
blogs, you get that crossover
from involved users
and almost random users.
So actually suddenly in
the end of the 2000s, there
was this muralism, where
people asked writers to do
these kind of big scale paintings.
So yes, it depends on
what you’re talking about, if
there is some kind of muralism,
we have to define if
it’s name writing related
muralist, which could be
big, but it was always background,
characters, small
pieces that were brought by
authors or by municipalities.
Not that quality muralism,
besides of the rules of exercise.
Then you’ve got that,
let’s say One-Author-Muralism,
sometimes very specific,
sometimes with some
kind of discourse, which
wasn’t the case of most of
the graffiti-writing muralism.
And then: Street Art.
For me it is very symbolic and
précising, but only when we
talk to about people from
the beginning. Street Art is
an American name for something
somehow existing
in different places, e.g. in
France it is Art de la Rue.
So there already existed
a word. Remember a time
when you called Street Art,
Art de la Rue. So it is interesting
to find the point where
people stopped using their
own name for Street Art to
use the American one and
what it changed.
Because Art de la Rue
in France was really a condescending
form of a guy
doing a living statue, space
art. It was the idea of doing
something in the street, but
getting paid directly for it -
like a spectacle.
But it was also a way for a
Hip Hop connected guy or
municipality to talk about something
that they don’t reco-
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