Tilt is an emblematic artist of the urban scene. He has been working for five years on the decontextualization of graffiti. The Montresso Art Foundation offers the artist a vast field of freedom within its Art Space. The exhibition FUTURE PRIMITIVE will be presented from December 14, 2019 in Marrakesh.
At the beginning it is a game, stories of friendships, and knowledge of the streets… It is also a context, sets of concrete and a city : Toulouse.
Very quickly, he created an identity : TILT. He thus became one of the main actors of the counter-graffiti culture in his city which was already very real in the United States. In 1991, TILT confronted the paradoxes of the inscription of graffiti as an art and made his first paintings in his teenage room.
Since then, the artist has constantly questioned this practice as an artistic approach, breaking down the unstable shifting boundaries of the artworks. Don’t talk to him about «L’air du temps»… His concern is quite different! It is profound and sincere, linked to a non visual language about destruction, disintegration and erasure. His paintings are not about representation but rather codification. At Jardin Rouge, during his various residencies, the artist searches and finds a language : the language of the walls…
The wall acts as a substrate for painting, as a witness to history. Tilt travels the world and takes photographs of the walls he discovers. He is inspired by their dilapidated and scarred surfaces. Like an archaeologist, he strives to reveal the past traces of the streets, the present ones and, he hopes, the ones of the future. TILT thus affirms the innate will of men to leave marks of their passages, from rock paintings to contemporary urban writings. More radically, it is about freedom. Even if this influence is not his own, his paintings are influenced by Kérouac and his love of unknown territory and primary freedom. FUTURE PRIMITIVE resonates like an affirmation of an artist who defies a conventional relationship to the world.
TILT’s primitive painting deals with a singular pictorial rhetoric. Through the installation created for the exhibition, the artist immerses us in his own contemporary reality. That of the playgrounds of his clandestine practices. He shows us the keys to his constructions. The works presented in resonance with it reveal the understanding of [his] determination not to represent but to naturally translate visual expressions. Each of the works contains a microcosm of our cities and their stories.
FUTURE PRIMITIVE unveils a frontal vision of the universe of TILT in which the signs and references to the heavy heritage of graffiti are hidden and juxtaposed in order to filter the perfect extract from the street. TILT also submits the visitors questions of a certain need for disorder.
