As soon as you enter the Galerie Poirel, which is hosting the "Fire on Fire" exhibition, the chorus of Blondie's Rapture takes you back to the 80s, when kids from the New York ghetto set out to conquer the galleries and clubs of the Big Apple's trendy downtown. At the time, it was through Hip Hop that graffiti was about to sweep the rest of the globe.
While the first generations of writers were more inclined towards soul or heavy metal, they were later greatly influenced by funk, jazz or reggae, as can be seen in the paintings by A.One, Daze or Bill Blast. Hip Hop is nevertheless a crucial milestone in this culture, and numerous allusions to this musical genre accompany visitors throughout the exhibition. From Doze Green's early B.Boys to the futuristic version embodied by Futura's Point Man to the gangly dancers of Japan's Taku Obata; from Rammellze's incredible Garbage God to this impressive collection of flyers testifying to the emergence of the Hip Hop movement, the exhibition is packed with treasures, some of which are shown here for the first time in Europe.
The explosion of street art at the turn of the new millennium coincided with the return of vinyl in the face of the democratization of the mp3. A whole new generation of artists seized on various musical genres such as pop, electro, punk and new wave. Shepard Fairey, Poch, Invader, Dran, André, Banksy, Os Gêmeos, JR... They all used music as a source of inspiration or a medium for creation, and can be found here in the form of flyers, concert posters, record sleeves or video clips. This is part of what makes this exhibition so interesting: by not limiting himself to studio works, Christian Omodéo, himself a great collector of archives of all kinds, reveals the breadth of urban art without restricting it to its aesthetics. The diversity of the documents on display makes it possible to approach the subject from different angles - artistic, sociological or anthropological - and thus presents this movement as a culture in its own right, rather than as an artistic genre too often summed up in various pictorial trends.
