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.