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J.P. Vorlet: Photographs
‘If there were flowers on the walls, there would be no graffiti,’ as Jean-Pierre Vorlet likes to say. With his photographer’s eye, he has created a world from these surfaces restlessly carved, scratched, scrawled and covered by others.
It was in Venice in 1968 when he first developed a fascination for these anonymous ‘traces’: streaks of white chalk on Venetian pink… But no one knows today whether the graffiti was drawn by the trembling hand of a lone man or by a young gondolier, touched by the same wind that shook the world from Berkeley to the Sorbonne.
Brassaï, another pioneer of graffiti photography, claimed that he had never caught the author of one of these traces, which range from poetry to vulgarity, including an outburst or insignificance. Anonymous as they are, they will always remain so, just like their fans. But thanks to photography, they advance further without leaving the wall that gave birth to them, to be shared by others in a different manner.
After wetting his large, open hand with a black liquid, man placed it on a rock. He had just expressed himself in a pictorial manner for the first time. He was driven to this gesture by the same impulse that today leads the lost man to place his despair on the walls, or the satisfied lover to draw or paint his joy.
We all therefore have a desire to say something without daring to do so, a desire to test our existence, a desire to rip our happiness or our misfortune from ourselves. Everyone has a secret reason for grabbing a paintbrush or chalk. Everyone has a reason for recounting their dream. Is there a bigger, always open notebook than the empty walls of our cities? Is there a greater echo for these ‘traces’ than the man in the street?
The author remains anonymous, the spectators unknown. Embarrassment is spared.
It is to share this collective memory that Jean-Pierre Vorlet has been ‘photographing’ all these testimonies of life in the world for fifteen years, from Prague to New York, from Berlin to London.
In Berlin, from one end of the Wall to the other, bearing all the shame of human conscience, all the hopelessness of a people is engraved, from the most violent ‘stains’ to the cruellest phrases: ‘A pity that concrete doesn’t burn…’ In Prague, an entire wall is dedicated to John Lennon, who sang ‘Imagine’ with love and ‘Spring’, which will not bloom in this city any time soon. People still lay flowers at the foot of this long wall tribute.
In this way, from city to city, especially in working-class neighbourhoods, sometimes in better-off places, one can see written on these walls the concerns, hopes or joys of people who often cannot speak openly. It is undoubtedly the best way for them to express themselves. Probably they would not have been able to do so verbally.
For adults, to graffiti is a return to the world of childhood. For the marginalised, it is the most employed means to fight against their doubts. For all young people, it is the only way to convey their own messages and to cry out their own fears to anyone who wants to hear them. From the craziest dream (‘Erase the mountains and you will see the sea’) to the most spontaneous poetry (‘Stop for a moment, you are so beautiful’), ‘graffiti artists’ are of all ages, often desperate, sometimes happy to be able to make their ‘traces’ readable as time corrodes. Night is their companion. But do they only have one companion? In fact, they never come across their friends, those who often look at, share or admire their drawings of the night.
For his own pleasure, and now a little for the ministry, Jean-Pierre Vorlet, with the application of a researcher, collects this wealth of silence in order to display it to us. By touring cities on foot and applying himself to decipher all these messages, a more intimate contact with a hidden reality of creation has been born, leaving aside the suffering. Almost always ephemeral, these ‘traces’ that Jean-Pierre shows us have found, thanks to photography and without their authors knowing it, a museum and its curator. Sometimes aesthetic, sometimes critical, his photographer’s gaze has been able to extract from the wall, framing it in his viewfinder, the most faithful echo of all the currents of modern painting. In fact, when looking at these images, it is impossible not to think of Antoni Tàpies, Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Klee or Robert Motherwell, so present is the mixture of spontaneity and research. ‘The most beautiful Picassos are within our reach, a brief moment of attention and abstraction is enough,’ says Jean-Pierre Vorlet.
For this awareness of certain human anxieties,
for the news of a joy and for other reasons to come,
for this desire to communicate through popular expression,
for the permanent echo in contemporary painting,
the work we propose to you today is remarkable: from now on we will walk the streets with a different outlook.
… and in the silent anonymity of the night, the concrete walls appear open to us. Like a big notebook in which everyone can write their diary from time to time, the diary of a moment of despair, but also of hope… Jean-Pierre Vorlet saw it written on a wall in his city: ‘Legalise the smile.’
Michel Dieuzaide
