72 pages 25 x 27 cm Language: French, English Softcover Publisher: Galerie Celal 2013
Gamard, born in Paris in 1977, came out of graffiti and turned to abstraction in 2011. The method that gives the book its title is literal: each canvas starts from a sample lifted out of a painting he admires — Mondrian, Kandinsky, Cy Twombly — broken down into elements and reassembled into something of his own. The borrowing is structural rather than quotational, and the point of it is an argument: that abstract expressionism and graffiti run on the same energy, and that the second is a legitimate heir to the first rather than a poor relation.
Studio canvases reproduced throughout, including the écriture folle series of 2012. Galerie Celal was one of the few Paris rooms in those years giving solo shows to painters from graffiti — Horfée, Pro176, Smash137, Sozyone Gonzalez — and this is one of the more articulate catalogues it produced, with the artist's own text on why he refuses the ideological partition between the two histories.
