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Updated: Leon Botha died from complications of progeria on 5 June 2011. My post about it here. South Africa: enough about football (BLK JKS, Amadou & Mariam and Angélique Kidjo live from Soweto) let’s talk about Art. A few days ago, as I was starting to write my new blog post about the 1980s, I visited the website of South African group Die Antwoord and I really like their music, a mix of conceptual rap-rave mutant hip-hop style. I especially appreciated “Enter Ninja” and then I watched the video on Youtube. An image immediately caught my attention: it was Leon Botha. I recognized him right away. Two or three years ago, my friend from South Africa told me about the first exhibition of South African artist Leon Botha, ‘one of the world’s oldest survivors of progeria’. But what I remember the most was his paintings of famous hip hop groups…⇒ READ MORE

I have always loved the black color, much to the despair of my family and friends who thought I may probably have some sort of psychological problem (a teenager wearing black is always very suspicious…). But I liked the color very much and still do (I am still wearing black but now it raises much less suspicion). When I was young, I never really care about what other people were thinking about my all black outfit and to the meaning I gave to the black color which I considered the source of everything. Then someone inadvertently confirmed I was right not to care because black was a color like any other, and maybe even more than that. This someone was French abstract artist Pierre Soulages, also known as ‘the painter of black’. It was in the late 80s when I first saw one of his paintings on television, it was…⇒ READ MORE

I unfortunately didn’t have much time left to hang around lately but there are some exhibitions I couldn’t miss. “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005“, a major retrospective of Leibovitz’s work, was definitely one of these. Last September, I spent an entire afternoon at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and I had a wonderful experience. The first time I heard about Annie Leibovitz was by a friend of mine, a photographer who was truly worshipping her. That was just after Keith Haring untimely death in 1990, when I saw the portrait she did of a self-painted and naked Keith Haring (who would have turned 50 this year). I was stunned by how she succeeded to emphasize Haring’s work and personality. A few years later, I read a very interesting article by Susan Sontag, feminist and literary theorist; at this time Sarajevo was under the bombings… Suddenly, everything…⇒ READ MORE

The trio is not physically in Paris right now but what they built is. Many architects, more or less famous, worked in Paris and gave the city ones of its finest and amazing buildings (and I am not talking about Baron Haussmann here). Gehry, Niemeyer and Meier are world wide known architects, and they are still involved in diverse projects at the four corners of the earth. I am not an architect (although I have already drawn several sketches of Sama style buildings and facilities), but architecture and design are two very close worlds. In 1994, when the American Center (now La Cinémathèque Française) opened 51 rue de Bercy in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, it was the first time I saw such a deconstructive building. Well, not really the first time, at this moment I was playing Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle (Electronic Arts) on PC, and Gehry’s…⇒ READ MORE

The purpose of this blog is to share with you, dearly readers, what (or who) inspires me, and Charley Harper‘s two-dimensional style illustrations definitely do. During a house moving, while rummaging through some ‘bric-a-brac’ stuff, I found an old magazine I kept only because an illustration of Charley Harper. It was a ladybug and it’s engraved in my memory forever. In my youth, I used to be up before daybreak to observe nature, I have always been impressed by the beauty and the complexity of wildlife surrounding us. But Charley Harper had a unique view of the natural world and could capture the essence of his subjects with the fewest possible visual elements, depicting animals, insects and nature (although the majority of his work was of birds) in a style he called ‘minimal realism’. Design, colors, symmetry/asymmetry, precision; everything is in the picture, with many details but the whole painting…⇒ READ MORE