Mes: mayo 2008

Graphic and urban artist BLU uses walls as canvas for his/her beautiful, delicate and elegant animations and paintings.

I’m not surprised to see some of this work being shown in the Tate Modern in London, and, as an architect, I really enjoyed how the paintings/animations are spatially conceived and take into consideration the scale and relationship with their close environment. Working spaces are carefully selected, as one can see in BLU’s blog, so this subtle dialogue can be achieved.

Such a deep sensitivity to the surrounding environment hasn’t struck me very frecuently when faced to the majority of street art. Most of it is intrusive or plainly aggresive, in the mood of advertisements, and limit themselves to smart trompe l’oeil effects. They hardly ever come to play using their materiality as a mean to attach to their canvas, and could just have been painted in any other place, without ever potentiating or reacting to their spatial framework.

It’s also worth having a look to BLU’s website as the graphic design is very nice: clean and personal.

The following video was the one that attracted my attention:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Another interesting urban artist worth knowing is SpY, which, through frequently subtle interventions on the urban landscape, brings to life and subverts the normal reading of our cities, much in the way of avant-garde, situationism.

Both BLU and SpY’s work look to me like an urban version of Land Art.

Some other street art artists which show some attention to the surrounding context in their works are Banksy or 108 (108 homepage).