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Fort de la Bastille - Grenoble (France)

Fort de la Bastille | Jérôme Mesnager 30/06/2015 11h25

We were very surprised to find a real homme blanc by Jérôme Mesnager at this point. This is the fourth 'fresque' of one of my favorite street artists from Paris I encountered here. Located on the walls inside the fortification.

 

JÉRÔME MESNAGER

White man,

a puppet of the present moment,

pitiless mirror of our gesticulations.

Born in Colmar (Haut-Rhin, France) in 1961.

As a ten-year-old in Paris, with his neighbour Jean Pierre Le Boul'ch, who ran in an art and poetry review, he crossed paths with the era's greatest artists including César, Armand, Ernest Pignon-Ernest and many more.

After attanding tje École supérieure d'arts appliqués in Bouille, and marked by the death of pop artist Robert Malaval in 1980, Jérôme Mesnager decided to paint the swiftness of life.

In daylong ephemenral art events held in abaonded spaces, using a paintbrush and a pot of white paint, he covered his body, transforming it into an "ideal body" that moved through a space transformed into an artistic composition.

On January 1983, at approximately 12h30, "l'homme blanc" ("the white man") appeared on the walls of abandoned housese, in the hopes of reducing the desolation in "expulsed" neighbourhoods...

This "character", a symbol of freedom, joy, and universality, quickly stepped off the walls of the city of Paris to spread its message of fraternity to the four corners of the earth, from Asia to the Egyptian pyramids. Several thousands have now joined the dance.

L'homme blanc - is he a comtemporary version of Auguste Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty? After all, both artists hail from France's Haut-Rhin!

 

Jérôme Mesnager

 

Wikipedia - Jérôme Mesnager (Français only)

 

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Uploaded on February 17, 2016
Taken on June 30, 2015