10 Question Column: French Conceptual Artist Alexis Rero

French artist Alexis Rero at Wunderkammern Gallery in front of a new work before the opening of his show.

French conceptual artist Alexis Rero new exhibition Supervised Independence has just opened at Wunderkammern Gallery in Rome. He talks to Jeanne-Marie Cilento about his work and life in our 10 Question Column and is photographed just before the opening of his show by Andreas Romagnoli

SUPERVISED Independence is Rero’s first show in Italy and the title is an oxymoron the artist uses to examine society with a series of rhetorical sentences. Alexis Rero made his mark as a street artist creating ironic, dystopian phrases on walls in abandoned spaces and erecting wooden letters in beautiful open fields in the French countryside as three-dimensional sculptures. His signature is a line crossing through words suggesting both a question mark and a negation of meaning.

He replaced traditional stylised graffiti letters with clear, bold letters that enhance the provocative one-liners designed to play with stereotypes and the phrases that infiltrate our lives from the internet. Some of the works in his new show are like abstract expressionistic paintings recalling the weathered, distressed walls he worked on as a street artist. Others are experiments with new materials and different forms of wordy installation.

The young artist did not start out life as a street kid but completed a Masters degree in Social Economy and Business Management at the Université Paris 2 and then studied graphic design at the London College of Communication. Rero has had exhibitions in Europe and the USA and is becoming well known for his pieces in both public, urban spaces and natural environments. Most of his work does revolve around language, either as single words or phrases designed to engage the viewer in their particular context. 

While he was in Rome, Rero created public works in different locations around the city, including a wall at the Roma Tre University with NUFactory and a collaboration with the French Institute of Saint-Louis where he left a permanent installation at Largo Toniolo 22.

1. What have you been working on?
I have been finishing work creating oxymorons for my exhibition in Rome. Indeed, if contradictions are not much appreciated at school, they are important issues of our time: Fair Trade, Positive Decay, Creative Destruction, Sustainable Development, Silent Metropolis etcetera...

2. What inspires you for your creative work now?
I like walking, traveling... moving as much as I can in the city, in the countryside, in abandoned places ... I feed myself especially by travelling and meeting with people. I use art as an excuse to go to meet people and to discover new ways of approaching the world.

3. How did you choose Street Art and installations as your creative metier?
As a teenager, for me graffiti represented a first contact with art and creative expression in general. When I was older, I felt increasingly cramped by graffiti with its codes and techniques, and I wanted to keep this initial energy, and change the medium to give myself new opportunities. So I naturally turned to outdoor installations with different media.

4. Can you describe the experience, person or training that has had the greatest impact on your artistic career?
When I met Tania Mouraud! She taught me a lot and she contributes greatly to my development in both human and artistic aspects. I admire her approach, her career and her radicalism.

5. What do you find the most challenging aspect of your work?
The choice of media and its context. As a matter of fact, my intervention is intended to be as "poor" as possible without a context. When this latter is placed in relationship with my intervention my proposal attempts to make sense. Things are created thanks to this interaction. Alone, they are nothing.

6. Where do you like to draw or create your initial ideas for your artwork?
Moving! I always have a sketch-book with me! It is even more important than my external hard disk. This is my future memory while my external drive saves my past history. It records all the lines and directions that I will explore in the future.

7. Do you have a set schedule of working creatively everyday or is the process more fluid?
I work on project and/or residence. I do not have a particular schedule of work as a painter.

8. What part of Street Art and/or creating installations gives you the most happiness and which other artists inspire you?
I love the activity of interacting with an environment. I like the work of Mark Jenkins, Baptist Debombourg, OX, Borris Tellegen and so on...

9. Is there a town or place in the world you find inspiring?
No city, no country in particular ... Each place gives me new energy and helps me to understand new directions.

10. In our digital age what do installations give us as an art form and how do you define contemporary art?
Installations are able to immerse the viewer into the world of the artist and they provide a warmer and more sensual relationship than digital media enables. Installations question the ephemeral and the boundaries between the real and the virtual, and these are important aspects in my work. But I use digital tools to build my installations.

Supervised Independence is open at the Wunderkammern Gallery until January 25th 2014 at Via Gabrio Serbelloni 124 in Rome. For more information visit: www.wunderkammern.net

Click on photographs for full-screen slideshow

The artist stands beneath one of his installations at Wunderkammern gallery in Rome.

Rero in front of one of his new works "Digital Dark Age" at his latest exhibition.

Untitled (Nothing to see here) Mixed media on canvas. Diptych 2013. 200 x 120cm

Untitled ( Obsolescenza programmata) From the series E-Book. ook under resin, adhesive letters, framed. 2013 52.5 x 52.5cm

Untitled (Damnatio Memoriae) From the series Condemnation of Memory. Neon Light 2013.  20 x 330cm

A distressed niche at Wunderkammern filled with Rero's wooden letters

Most of Rero's work revolves around language, either as single words or phrases designed to engage the viewer in their particular context. 

Untitled (Meglio appassionato di belle ragazze che di gay). From the series "Positive Discrimination." Pasta, adhesive letters and frame. 2013 41.5 x 51.5cm

Rero in front of his installation at Wunderkammern: Untitled (I panni sporchi si lavano in casa). Mixed media (frames, canvas, wood, nails).  2013

Untitled (Perdita di memoria). Mixed media on canvas. Diptych 2013. 200 x 120cm 

Untitled (Digital dark Age) form the series "contemporary Roman Ruins". Mixed media on wood. 2013 106 x 126.5 cm 

Untitled (I panni sporchi si lavano in casa). Mixed media (frames, canvas, wood, nails).  2013 

Alexis Rero working on creating one of his outdoor installations in France: "Google Street View". 

Rero's completed though-provoking installation in a green field

Created in an abandoned building, Rero's work on a colourful, dessicated wall.

"Not Found" resonates as an ironic phrase in a derelict church.

Rero plays with slogans and phrases we are constantly subject to on the internet. 

"It wasn't me" ~ another of Rero's interventions in an abandoned space that captures the street artist's danger of being caught by city authorities.

In a contemporary world where everything and nothing can be considered art, Rero writes a well-placed rhetorical comment: "Is this Art?'

DAM Architecture Highlights 2013: The Scope House in Japan

Poised on a hill looking over tea plantations in Southern Japan, Scope is a sculptural new building designed by mA-style architects, reports Jeanne-Marie Cilento. Photographs by Kai Nakamura

DESIGNED as a giant viewfinder, the building has a jutting rectilinear snout that takes in the green swathes of the surrounding tea bushes. The house is compact ~ barely one hundred square metres ~ but has the strong presence of an abstract Henry Moore statue and the charisma of Le Corbusier’s small chapel at Ronchamp. The telescopic second level has a single glazed wall, like a lense, focusing all attention out to the brilliant emerald plants producing green tea that cover the Makinohara Plateau below.

Atsushi and Mayuma Kawamoto of mA-style architects wanted to create a contemporary new building in this small town in Shizuoka Prefecture. Sited high on a stone platform, Scope is resoundingly Modernist but has a certain grace of scale and lightness that prevents it dominating the landscape dotted with modest houses.

“We felt it was necessary for the client, who has lived in this area a long time, to design a building which could recapture the charm of the land afresh,’’ Atsushi Kawamoto explains. “The site consists of a tiered stone wall in a landslide prevention zone which is why we couldn't use the whole site for construction. We created the "telescope" form on the second level as a trapezoid because the view to the north is beautiful and the room spreads out in that direction."

Supported on two slanting volumes of exposed concrete, the second level’s horizontal viewfinder is rendered in a contrasting crisp white. "This large opening on the north side projects out into the landscape and catches the changes of the season and daily weather, bringing in light and a feeling of the wind," say the architects.

Entry to the house is through a covered courtyard created by the concrete walls. Inside, the light-filled entrance is bare apart from an elegant white spiral stair leading up to the main floor. The ground level houses a Japanese room and bathrooms that flank either side of the entry.

The curving stairway leads up to the top floor with several bedrooms and the spacious open plan living and dining room with its single expansive view across the tea plantations. Here, the interior has been kept to minimalist essentials with concrete floors, white walls and a pale, stream-lined kitchen.

“The internal space is simply organised so it is in harmony with the scenery outside,” Kawamoto says. “We can really create a rich experience by tying human beings and nature together through architecture.”

The slim and elegant spiral stair leading up from the entrance to the top level.

 The "lense" of the telescopic second level that has glazed walls and doors opening on to a balcony that forms the rim of the viewfinder.

The stream-lined kitchen with a far-reaching outlook across the tea plantations of Southern Japan.

The brilliant green tea bushes covering the Makinohara Plateau in the Shizuoka Prefecture in Japan.

The minimalist living and dining room divided by a sleek kitchen all in white.

The main bathroom with its deep Japanese tub, long basin with mirrored cupboards above and stony, concrete walls.

The house sits like a sculptural monument on a tiered stone wall above the modest local houses.

Slanted walls of raw concrete support the white-rendered, telescopic second level.

A courtyard of slim trees and gravel is created between the two concrete volumes of the ground floor that support the full-width of the top level above.

Scope lit up at twilight creating a welcoming courtyard entrance into the house.

Highlights of Haute Couture 2013: Lagerfield's Chanel SS13 Show

Under the great domed glass roof of the Grand Palais in Paris, Karl Lagerfield created a leafy fairytale forest for his spring-summer Chanel haute couture collection, writes Jeanne-Marie Cilento

MODELS drifted out of the woodland like elfin sprites into an open clearing before disappearing back into the gloaming. “I wanted a magical forest mixed with an antique theatre made of wood,” said Lagerfield after the show. “I saw it in a dream, put the idea on paper, made a sketch and gave it to the man who builds my sets. I think he made it beautifully. I didn’t want the usual runway with the models walking out one after the other with military speed. This was a more romantic catwalk”.

Although Raf Simons’ collection for Dior was also set among trees and curving hedges of bright green box, it was much lighter and more effervescent. Lagerfield created a darker, more Gothic mood. The woodland was wilder with looming Holm oaks and Scots pines and the clothes were more dramatic with Lagerfield’s inspiration veering from lacy Victorian tea gowns to brightly-patterned 1970s style prints.

The gauzy dresses and the models' dark eyes ringed by a feathery patch and bouffant Edwardian hair all added to the sense of historical drama. A scholar of fashion history, Lagerfield draws from an ample visual archive to inspire and create avant-garde designs that are both contemporary and still linked to the Chanel tradition.

This season’s collection mixed materials like black Chantilly lace with cream bouclé and thigh-high leather boots. The long, clinging boots were also made of the same material as the dresses or gold lame and net with peep-toes. Column dresses that looked like prints from a distance were actually covered in thousands of hand-beaded, embroidered and sequined flowers and then cinched at the waist with slim red belts.

Opening the show were dresses in white, black and navy but also in subtly sparkling metallic colours. “There were silvery, goldish and off-white materials but they were not tweeds but woven ribbons of silk, tulle and satin," said Lagerfield. "These materials are totally weightless and all made by hand - there is not one you can buy in a shop." 

The designs were all connected to the theme of the forest with leaves, flowers and feathers all forming decorative elements of the clothes. Tailored bell-like skirts and tops that stood away from the body were constructed like the petals of a flower. The gowns and eveningwear were either full-skirted and made of lace and white feathers or slim Thirties’ sheathes covered in red, black and white sequins of flowers.

“I love embroidery," explained Lagerfield. "And I love the idea of making embroidery like a print. It is the top of sophistication. Nobody would think that the flowers could take two thousand hours to make. But the skirts are very light even though they have half a million little sequins on them." 

Collars and lapels were wide and the necklines filled with panels of white embroidery, beading or tulle finely pleated and covered in tiny pearls. Feathers and strands of chiffon fell in soft folds over the front of the models hair that Lagerfield said was inspired by a portrait of Coco Chanel.

The focus of this collection was the shoulders and making them look beautiful. Long dresses with white beaded yokes and straight black necklines served to heighten and emphasize both the neck and shoulders. “I wanted to show the real neck and shoulder and give some volume to the silhouette," Lagerfield said. "Some of the evening dresses have white embroidery close to the neck that is like a light reflector in a photographic studio. It is very becoming."

Most of the peep-toe boots were tight and in silver leather and lace and either climbed the whole length of the leg or came as short ankle boots. “There were dresses that seemed like they had tight pants underneath," Lagerfield said. "But no they were not pants but boots, half in lace and the other half in the material of the skirt. I like the idea of using high boots but open like sandals then a big zip behind like a seam at the back of a stocking.”

As a finale to the show, Lagerfield sent out not one bride but two dressed in filmy white gowns of lace and feathers, making both a political and an aesthetic statement.

Click on photographs for full-screen slideshow