Through 60-plus portraits of French and international sportspeople, famous stencil artist Christian Guémy, alias C215, continues his fight for entertaining, accessible, altruistic art.
“I particularly appreciate Caravaggio, his drawing, his chiaroscuro and the fact he painted ordinary people,” enthuses Guémy, who lives and has his studio in Vitry-sur-Seine. Using stencils this French street artist has developed a very personal style of urban art featuring children, down-and-outs and anonymous figures, which he practises in the Paris suburbs and around the world. “If today I’m tackling sport it’s because I think it too is a neglected popular culture that tends to be denigrated by certain intellectual and artistic milieus,” Guémy states. The present project was born when Thibault Sarda, the exhibition’s curator, contacted C215 after the tragic death of boxer Alexis Vastine along with Florence Arthaud and Camille Muffat in a helicopter accident in 2015. Out of their meeting came the idea for an ambitious exhibition linking sport and street art.
Multicolour team work
“Most of the French sportspeople depicted agreed to give something they owned,” the artist explains. So Sarah Ourahmoune’s boxing shorts, Laura Flessel’s fencing outfit and Eric Cantona’s football shirt have been turned into artworks. Complementing these pieces, some 40 portraits that the stencil artist produced on the street have been printed on Dibond, among them skater Nathalie Péchalat, tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Renaud Lavillenie and Sébastien Chabal. “I like sport’s values, what it brings to our society,” sums up Guémy, who has included wheelchair sport too in his exhibition. And alongside the athletes we see coaches, selectors and managers. An artistic panorama of sport, intimate and uninhibited.
Exposition « Athlètes », jusqu’au 21 mai
Nice, stade Allianz Riviera
www.museedusport.fr
Côteweb 2021, création de site Internet sur Nice