stick-it-to-me-ters

tiny stickers go on small surfaces to animate these otherwise banal meter boxes...
stickers attract more stickers and proportionately shrunken tags, and soon, voila, a self-contained site of colour and texture and self-expressionistic remains to brighten any meter-reader's day...

[Rue Vieille-du-Temple]

sign-aged

seriously...
is this an inverse invitation to stick them up anyways...
is this an ironic irritant to post some more...
or perhaps just another lovely old sign of a paris past...

[I think I will appropriate this next for my new header "signage"!]

art-squeeze

around the side wall of an impeccably polished gallery showcasing soft-edgy and hip-weary contemporary chinese art is the most ferociously raw and haphazardly "collaborative" piece of exterior ooze...
the peeling paint, the almost unassuming tags, the anthropomorphic turd[??], the abstract black and white patches, the grit and the grime - all contribute to a visual palette exuding out of some primeval need to squeeze the ink out of pens, the paint out of brushes, the spray out of cans and make a mark, a gesture, a movement, to inform this bleary-eyed jaded crowded wilderness that is paris contemporary primitive...

[Rue du Poitou]

brain-freeze

an arresting image in the window of Atelier KAO on rue Commines made me stop in my tracks and study this enormously detailed brain-like painting made from "l'encre dropée sur la toile"...
the organic conglomeration of such a densely writhing and squiggly mass hijacked my eyes into its mesmerizing visual labyrinth, and as I captured it in my camera, the image fused with my own congested greyish matter in a frozen web of inky darkness...

rejointoiement

from messy working garage to pristine art factory, this slimmed down solo citroen by Gabriel Orozco, our part-time neighbour in Paris, has pride of place on an upper level of the Centre Pompidou...
in the end is it just a lovely old french car cut in half and re-served as a clever sculptural counterpoint to over-slick showrooms of over-sleek new models promising yet more roomy joy-rides...
[or looking backwards in my rétroviseur, I may be slightly regretful for the missing middle...]

rejuvenation

she seems so vulnerable and violated - her belly exposed, her mouth opened in a silent cry, her eyes blinded, and thin wires like delicate veins pulled out through various orifices...
I am seldom witness to the mechanics of rejuvenation surgery of older models, and the inner workings of a traditional messy garage with its scattering of strangely shaped tools and instruments and bottles of toxic ooze...
all in the service of beautifying and reinvigorating a once sweet young thing that refuses to stay off the streets...

bleu180

this is an intriguing number on a cobalt blue back door...
not indicating an address, nor a company's name...
a measurement, perhaps?...180 cm high?
a directional key?...180 meters up? 180 steps down...to hell??
180 degrees upside down???
I am still puzzled...
[actually I do know it is advising that the door is 1.8 meters high, but for those who do not calculate in metric, it is an odd number to contemplate...]

[located somewhere south of the Hôpital La Pitié-Salpêtrière and west of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France F.M. in an area where contemporary galleries once had high hopes of thriving...]

red 13

trapped behind 2 bars and glass, I thought a superhero had been captured and incarcerated under this most unpopular of numbers...
upon closer study, he appears to be a proud gladiator or centurion confined in a niche once reserved for a more sanctified figure, [although he does hold a cross to his chest and what seems to be a large black bird lies at his feet!], but now he stands guard within a blood-red wall on a street where nothing much happens...

[anybody knows whom he might represent?]

[13, rue Charles V]

archi-totemic

the "gangplank" balconies jutting out precariously from the upper floors caught my eye as I biked along the other side of the Bassin de la Villette - enough to make me stop to take a picture - and I immediately wanted to go up there and experience the vertigo of being out on those bold protrusions...
the angled verticals of this structure as defined as well by the different colour applications [white and graphite grey on this façade, burnished red on the other side] provide a dynamic visual interest that attempts to reflect the Suprematist ideals of Malevich by which the architectural design's sculptural arrangements must express effecting aesthetic and emotional values...
in other words, height and bulk can be made to look appealing - and even playful to live in...just don't play crazy pirates way up there!

[known as "Totem" and "Tower of Flandres", this building was designed by Pascal Chombart de Lauwe and Jean Lamude of TECTONE in 1996,
27-29, avenue de Flandre et 6, rue du Maroc (19th)]

face-off

on the side wall of a non-descript apartment building friendly faces of various hues and ages loom over me... they may be residents of the neighbourhood, they may be well-known personages [I think I recognize a couple - Piaf? Chevalier?]...
they animate the bland architecture and they make one lift one's gaze from street level to make eye contact with their stacked and larger than life visages...

[portrait mural by Claude Cussinet and Andre Pistun on Rue de Belleville]

rest in pieces

I walk through the small busy marché outside the cemetery walls and enter the floating stillness within a garden of perpetual rest...

alone in the bright light of day I am unafraid to approach the neglected tombs of forgotten souls - one now marked by only a broken crucifix and a few fallen twigs - a perfectly untouched nature morte that bespeaks the poetics of death more eloquently than the most ornamented graves...

[Cimetière de Belleville, a small cemetery with one prominent "resident" whom I googled - Léon GAUMONT (1864-1946), an inventor, engineer, industrialist and a pioneer of the motion picture industry]

coffin-couture

from white flat figures in limbo on the urban landscape to a live audience of appreciative young minds, here to learn about the business of ART... and the business of death from the previous incarnation of the space LE CENT QUATRE as the state undertaker...
the display of oddly cool white t-shirts depicting various styles of coffins does not seem to faze these children so full of life and wonder at the creative eccentricities of the world...

angst-alone

on a quiet stretch of the quai des Celestins just a couple of blocks from where I stay I meet a shy and lonely nude man...
he is trapped in a blocked-up doorway of the solitary house overlooking the Seine...cars whizz by with no regard and strollers only give him a quick quizzical glance...
he is reduced to a one-dimensional contorted angular anguished mass, his body language a dramatic rejection of the hurried and disquieted world...

[I know I have been on a run with "white bodies" this past few posts, but it is odd that the more people are disconnected from each other, the more one sees the population of substitute human forms!]

flue up, way up

from drainpipes to chimney flues, the creative efforts of determined [and courageous!] artists appear wherever visible...
even an "established" graffiti artist like MESNAGER managed to find a way to fly/climb/tele-transport up this enormous chimney to place one of his corps blanc...perhaps an exhortation to keep at it until galleries and museums acknowledge your persistance and/or talent for such things and you are finally worth the price of admission...

[Rue de la Villette]

[Jerôme MESNAGER invented l'Homme en blanc way back in 1983 as "un symbole de lumière, de force et de paix" that is so ubiquitous now they are seen the world over...his site has the coolest video of where all his white ghostmen have roamed.]

foreign body

the most basic of figurative depiction enlivened by graphic descriptions in chinese characters and arabic script (?) around its apparently female salient features...
I have no idea what it is signifying, but my first instinct was something health or medical-related...??...any decipherer or decoder out there?

[Thanks to Adam for his colourful post a while ago on Rue Dénoyez, which I wandered onto recently and found this paste-up and other wildly primitive vibes and vignettes... this is also a flow-out to his thing for drainpipe "art"!]

[paris-lorient]

a slight detour to Lorient on the Morbihan coast in Brittany [and a momentary departure from single-image posting!] for this colossal "primitive" discovery...
such primal-sexual manifestation of a sous-marin sliding into its german-built brutalist concrete "bunker" casing is not so easily chanced upon!

the amount of medieval-thick concrete expanses of this complex is so massive and solid that even as it has no longer served its purpose for decades, it is still much too overwhelming to demolish and discard...

and so it sits, this enormous dirty grey mammoth hulk, for little boys and big men [et moi!] to come and gawk and contemplate its brute design, its forceful genesis, its sinister purpose...

now a benign home to "FLORE", the last remaining submarine to hold the fort, so to speak... but forever on dry land!

[Base de sous-marins de Kéroman, 56100 Lorient...beside the new high-design Cité de la Voile Eric Tabarly, dedicated to the legendary breton sailor Eric TABARLY and his extraordinary sailing legacy]

paris-hong kong

the shop of 10,000 things, plastic galore, made in China...
an old chinese man prances by, his long grey moustache pasted in a swirl pattern on both cheeks...
a bowl of cracked boiled eggs and a pile of peanuts in their shells atop a cardboard box on the sidewalk...
french spoken with a chinese accent, chinese spoken with a french accent...
the wafting smell of barbeque chickens and ducks...
I am in Hong Kong, I am in Guangzhou, I am chinese again...

[Rue de Belleville]

paris-dar djerba

just a few blocks over from the Marais and I enter foreign terrain...my senses are inundated by the exotic sights and smells of sunny north Africa...

I am careful where I point my camera as large crowds of men congregate on one side of the boulevard...and on the other quieter side, women sit on the sidewalk begging in between abundant displays of dried fruit and colourful spices...

[Boulevard de Belleville]

from very tiny holes...

...issue the most minute and valiant of green life in the midst of the most busy of cities...
cracked star-burst black pearls of sidewalk aggregate somehow seeded, rain [and spit?]-dampened, germinated and sprouted underfoot on the mostly barren and aptly named Rue de la Perle...
a miniature collaborative art-nature installation that I almost stepped upon!

tower power

like an enormous Escher puzzle, the intricately crafted architectural models of the most progressive tower designs are arranged on a raised curvilinear-edged platform for giant humans to view from above...
the twisted bottle-shaped Escher Tower by the high-powered-design BIG [Bjarke Ingels Group] of Copenhagen emitting its multi-hued light patterns projects as a beacon to another eurocentric rise of a visionary vertical renaissance...

["L'Invention de la Tour Européenne" Pavillon de l'Arsenal, 21, bld Morland 75004 Paris]