ZOER & VELVET

Zoer, Frédéric was born in 1985 in Palermo (IT). When he was a young child, he would draw cars, traffic jams, and breaker’s yards. A few years later, he started working in the comics sector, published his first fanzines,  and developed a taste for story-telling. From 2003 he started doing graffiti and practising painting as a whole, through the techniques of acrylic and oil.

Velvet, Matthieu was born in 1986 in La Roche-sur-Yon (FR). The sea-side, industrial environment he grew up in soon impacted his drawings and comics. In the 2000s, he began using spray paint and also learnt acrylic painting, and later oil painting.

Their paintings are based on the combination of their photographic memories, from where they draw their inspirations for the scenes, objects and letters they represent. Their compositions evolve as they travel and meet new people. The two artists met while studying industrial design. Their passion for graffiti led them to create in 2004 the CSX crew (CSX stands for the French equivalent of “Unemployed Without any eXperience”). Seeking to go beyond the supports or media of expression, they enjoy mixing disciplines together. Their working space is always at the heart of their concerns, and their paintings always tend to engage with the space in which they are displayed. Using their experience as industrial designers, they regularly place the subject at the heart of their work. Incidentally, they develop assembled arrangements and installations bridging the gaps between their paintings and the tangible reality of the subjects they address. They paint the walls together and like to take into consideration the role of collective efforts and adopt a project-centered approach, however, they have chosen to make most of their paintings individually, and cultivate their own questions. But do not take it as a sign of rivalry, exercising their critical power on the other allows each of them to have a more objective look on their own pictorial research.