Ten years ago, during the weekend of 16 and 17 June 2012, the Californian artist Franck Shepard Fairey, known as Obey, created his first large-scale Parisian fresco on the corner of Boulevard Auriol and Rue Jeanne d'Arc, as part of the Boulevard Paris 13 programme run jointly by Galerie Itinerrance and the Paris 13th district municipality. Rise above rebel features, in red and black, a woman's face looking upwards, which for the author is "the archetype of someone who has endured oppression, but who perseveres and rises above it".
In the upper right-hand corner of the facade, he signs his work with his Obey Giant logo in the centre of a flower. Shepard Fairey was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design when he designed it in 1989 to be reproduced on stickers and posters distributed by a community of skateboarders and street artists, as part of a campaign entitled André the Giant Has a Posse. Shepard Fairey explains that this campaign can be seen as an experiment in phenomenology, one of the main aims of which was for the young artist to " reawaken a sense of wonder about one' s environment ". Probably influenced at the time by the science fiction film They Live, released in 1988, in which the word “obey” is visible on a panel in one scene and one of the main characters is a wrestler, the logo represents in a stylised manner the face of the French wrestler André Roussimoff (1946-1993). The latter, who suffered from pituitary gigantism or acromegaly, was 2.24m tall and weighed up to 245kg, and was known as André the Giant. He is the only French wrestler to have been World Wrestling Champion and was the first to be posthumously inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame a few months after his death in 1993.
Also known for his Hope poster, a portrait of Barack Obama in the colours of America created in 2008 during the presidential campaign, Shepard Fairey has created three other frescoes in Paris around themes of great significance to him, such as environmental protection, respect for democratic values, and the importance of education and knowledge to shape the future. Visit the Today and Tomorrow chapter of Looking Up Paris to (re)discover these works.
Comments