L’Atlas

Born in 1978 in Toulouse (France), he lives in Paris.

Calligraffitis in the past-present

L‘Atlas is doing something new with the art of graffiti, developing a distinctive kind of stylised signature in public space, the “crypto-tag.” Atlas was the Greek god who, according to the Theogony, held up the world. An Atlas, of course, is also a collection of maps conveying the spatial characteristics of our planet’s landmasses and seas. To refer to the classical god Atlas is thus to invoke the myth of a force that supports the world, and, more generally, the beliefs of ancient times when mythos, the territory of magical thinking, had yet to give way to the logos, to the thought that rationalises the world and removes the imaginary dimension. To refer to the cartographic atlas is to signify that, by his action of signing, the artist means to appropriate the world, with no geographical restrictions. Signing himself with this identity wherever his footsteps take him – all around the world, in fact –, the artist not illogically uses a graphic typology that belongs to an immemorial culture, that of calligraphy. This is a way of melding the old and the new, but also of indicating how art defies and moves freely back and forth in time. For the artist, it is a matter of making signs, of asserting the continuity of the artistic imprint in human history. Art, in its way, also holds up the world.

The first name chosen by this artist in the 1990s, when he started tagging the walls of Paris, was “Socle” (base, pedestal). It bespeaks a desire for roots, the determination to find a place, to carry something, too (whether oneself or the world, or both), in the same cumulative, consanguine ensemble. But this adventure was soon curtailed. Arrested by the police for vandalism, Socle decided to change his name and “manner.” L’Atlas was henceforth the name that he would sign in whatever part of the world he elected to visit, be it Europe, Japan, Mexico or Bangkok. But this signature was not conventional. From now on, he would “tape” his name: an unaggressive way of taking over the inhabited space. This use of adhesive tape was inspired by his work in cinema, where he was training as an editor, and where collage and adhesive were among the techniques. Instead of a wall, the support used by L’ATLAS would be the standard canvas, like a conventional painter. To begin with, this is covered with caches in sticky tape. Then the canvas is sprayed. Finally the adhesive tape is removed, revealing the artist’s name in a calligraphic form, and in a geometrical style.
L’Atlas rejects decorative graffiti: what counts is his signature. In his late teens, this latter-day western Siddharta Gautama embarked on a nomadic existence that took him to Brazil, Morocco, Egypt and Syria, where he studied alongside internationally renowned calligraphers, the Middle Atlas (North Africa), then Cairo and Damas: the equivalent of a journey of initiation in the complex and symbolic world of calligraphy.

With L'Atlas, the tag has a distinctive and unique form. Instantly recognisable, it tends to be formally inscribed within the surface of a square, which allusively evokes the Oriental mandala, that symbolic model of the “world-totality.” It can be read as a play of lines as much as a mysterious ideogram. Some read the artist’s large floor compositions as mazes. They can also be read as compasses, which would be far from incoherent. Many of these tags glued to the ground are precisely oriented in space, and sometimes even mention the cardinal points. All obey the artist’s intention, which is to “forge closer links between calligraphy and graffiti, between the age-old spirit of a gestural tradition and the impulsive energy of a movement constructed simply with the energy of the wrist.”