Rero: Exploring the World of Urban Art

I just received an e-mail by well-known French urban artist Rero, who informed me about a ruthless initiative by the city of Paris, who plans to break down the beautiful La Jarry, an old, huge and crazy building near Paris, which is used by many artists as studio and exhibition space… To escape of this tragic end, several artists organised the exhibition-series Saving La Jarry, which also includes a work by Rero, who was invited to paint one big word on the huge facade: the crossed out letters PARADIGM! Rero describes it as follows: ...

There are already some articles about French urban artists Rero and his “Image Negation” artworks, but recently, he agreed to answer some of my questions about himself, the intention behind his abandoned artworks and about the popularity of clear and simple typography artworks around the world. To cut a long story short, here is my first interview with one of my current favorite urban artists from Europe… uac: Although you are relatively unknown for the majority of the people, your urban artworks have become very popular recently. How would you describe yourself? Where are you from? And how would you characterise your work? ...

Some weeks ago, I wrote an article about urban artist Rero and his abandoned messages. Yesterday I received an e-mail by Rero with nice photos of new artworks attached, which I will show you today! “It was too cold in Berlin to paste up and making stencils as well … so I come back to Paris and the following result… Some fresh abandonned messages about Image Negation featuring Ludo!” (Rero) “Image Negation” is Rero’s recent street art project. It’s minimalist typography with deletion, serving a lot of joke and understanding. I like this abandoned messages! ...

I was really flashed, when I saw the photos of Rero’s great new text-message artworks in an abandoned hospital somewhere in Paris yesterday on Ekosystem! Rero is a conceptual artist with a graffiti background, although the only similarity between graffiti and his artworks is that both can be seen on the streets. He calls his very minimalistic and simple style “Image Negation”, which is a reversion of the rules of classical illustration: ...