Description
Arzhel Prioul, alias Mardi Noir, has done several residencies at the Lycée Pierre-Adrien Pâris and the Lycée Granvelle in Dannemarie-sur-Crête, exceptionally spread out between 2020 and 2021 due to the health crisis.
Mardi Noir offered several workshops, introducing the students to its practice of hijacking road signs. After a few sketches and first attempts on cardboard, an initiation (for some) to paint, spray, masking tape, etc., the students had the opportunity to dress their schools with wooden signs, more durable.
Painted with spray paint, using from time to time the stencil technique, they were imagined and made with their hands, alone or in duo, and play with the color codes and pictograms usually very standardized.
Action
These workshops were conducted within the framework of the “Artistes plasticiens au lycée” program proposed by the Burgundy-Franche-Comté Region. Through this program – and with the partnership of the DRAC and the DRAAF – the Regional Council of Franche-Comté aims to arouse the curiosity and encourage the initiatives of high school students by meeting artists and discovering places of creation and artistic dissemination.
Three approaches are approached during the residency: the encounter with a work through the discovery of a creative process, the artistic and cultural practice and the construction of an aesthetic judgment. Having begun with a visit to Bien Urbain, the objective is to bring the students to discover the field of urban arts, as much through sensitivity as through practice.
Biography
Obsessed with the exploration of urban margins and the graphic detour of objects, Mardi Noir articulates his work around pictograms, taking them out of their function and context. He inscribes them in a reality where everyone can be himself, and not a consumer confronted with capitalism. For this artist, everything is a question of contradiction: shift and confrontation of the useful and the useless, of the past and the present, of presence and absence.
Photos credits
Mardi Noir, Chloé Cura