JEAN STARCK - A TIMELESS PIONEER OF URBAN ART Jean Starck is a
pioneer of the street art movement. As Art-Cloche, between 1981 and
1989, the group launched the first artistic occupancy movement in
Paris that developed from within abandoned industrial buildings. In
the 1990s a whole generation of artists rushed into the breach
created by Art-Cloche. New alternative artistic practices appeared.
On obsolete sites occupied by the artists a new art form was created,
that involved the squatting of these sites. This movement has become
a turning point within the French art scene. A retrospective of the
history of the movement took place in 2002 at the Palais de Tokyo,
thereby offering an historical dimension to this manifestation of
urban art. Alongside his iconoclastic activities with Art-Cloche,
Jean Starck has expressed a philosophical quest for art through
excesses and especially through his metaphysical wanderings. These
activities include the creation in 1981 of the Transmigration group
just before the creation of the Art-Cloche group, art groups that
conducted experimental excursions that follow those conducted before
them by the Surrealists and the Situationists.
Thus the artistic work that Jean Starck engaged in between 1981
and 1991 is directly related to the Transmigration group. Similarly,
in 1998, this work was extended via the construction and
deconstruction of a Universal Mandala. These timeless works were
undertaken within the scope of the Transmigration quest to rekindle
qualities of transience, freedom and magic within artworks.
In work undertaken by Jean Starck since 2000 contradictions and
constraints resulting from urban iconography are explored. The artist
has illustrated through primitive means the human soul and the world
of painting, using series of collages and other mixed techniques
including assemblies and symbols (such as dogs, portraits, recycled
posters and squatting manifested as an art of reconstruction), thus
multiple techniques that reflect the syntactic complexity of our
current world.
