Art I Like 12 by Florent Vial

“What now seems like a lifetime but is merely a decade ago I sat slumped at my desk, head on arm pushing a pencil round a piece of paper dreaming up ways to kill time and break the chains holding me to my desk, Monday to Friday each day became the same and I was eating my brain.

Then one day whilst dreaming up further ideas in the series of 'Ways to kill time' the pencil lines on the pad started to become characters, strange and dysfunctional they formed my dysfunctional world which had no rule. Slowly I figured the pencil could be replaced with a marker pen - the Pentel N50 to be exact - and the paper replaced with cheap vinyl which was 'acquired' from DIY stores, these characters once resigned to a life on paper filed in a folder under 'Not suitable for visual consumption' began to have a life of their own; adhered to lamp post and electri-cal boxes they plotted and linked my route home, one became 10 and slowly 10 became more than I can remember. Each evening and as much of the day as I could rob was spent drawing and cutting out stickers. Stickers became posters, posters became more ambi-tious... and somewhere in between I quit my job or maybe that was I got fired, either way the inevitable had hap-pened. Like a river cuts it's own path, I'd cut mine.

This family of dysfunctional characters began evolve, they started to satirise and hold to ransom all that fell into their grasp – a welcome jolt of subversion in today’s media-saturated environment - the very same thing I'd grown up on. Bank notes were drawn and printed over and put into circulation for the unsuspecting to receive in their change, billboards taken over with public service announcements...

I wanted to encourage people to not just to 'see', but to look at what surrounds them and their lives, reflecting our increasingly bizarre popular culture, re-thinking and reworking cultural figures and genres to comment on our ethos of conspicuous consumption. A Pandora’s box of bittersweet delights - sweet and sugary on the surface, but with an unfamiliar, uncomfortable, taste beneath.

This isn't the beginning, it's not the end it's happy never ending.

This isn't the beginning, it's not the end it's happy never ending.”

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Miss Van started wall-painting in the streets at the age of 18 in the early 1990s, initiating the feminine movement in street art. She is now exhibiting all around the world from NY to LA, Europe (France, Spain, Italy, UK), and Asia. An artist's impact is truly felt when their work becomes so familiar that it's hard to remember what the world was like without it. When the Toulouse native and current Barce-lona resident MISS VAN's sultry female characters began to pop up on city center walls in the mid 1990s, they instantly possessed a timeless quality, as if women had always painted such graffiti in the streets. City residents developed relationships with their local MISS VAN charac-ters. While MISS VAN's work incurred the wrath of some feminists who found them offensive to women, on the whole it has a rare appeal that transcends gender.

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Bristol Based Mr Jago, a pioneer of the doodle, founder member of Scrawl Collective and a veteran in the street art movement and much respected among his peers.Growing up in a small town, Jagos interests in art and design with influences from classic Marvel comics, graffiti and hip-hop culture have help forge his unique freehand style and distinct colour palette.Jago has worked with some of the biggest international brands such as Nike, Puma, Xbox, Yohji Yamamoto & Boxfresh to name a few.

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