Frenchman C215 burst into the wider UK street-art consciousness with an array of sumptious portrait stencils in March this year and he was invited back by Banksy to be a major contributer to Cans Festival. His stencil art focusses on weather-beaten old men and women whose lined faces wear their experience of a life well lived, or young boys and girls from South American barrios he visits, or his daughter.
C215
C215
C215
Along comes ACE with a selection of fairly mundane paste ups, bombing the same turf around Hoxton and Shoreditch. Ace’s quality is patchy, some stuff is eyecatching and great whilst merely adding a cartoon character’s head or eyes to a photocopied photograph reduces the bulk of it to pretty average.
Ace
Ace
No problems for a while, until Ace decides to go over the recent C215 stuff.
Ace - compare this with the first photo at the top
The placement is aggressive; no defence on the grounds of C215’s stuff aging or fading can be sustained, the pieces were still fresh and un-tagged over. The evident difficulty of ACE’s paste-up location spoke of very deliberate going over. The effort and skill required to paste-up behind those tight bars without the paper wrinkling or sticking in folds speaks of intense focus on the process.
Ace has some previous in this area, going over a rather tasty but un-identified painted wave in Blackaller Street (Kozyndan? Theirs used a rolling bunny motif in the wave crest), see also Copyright (above, third photo from top), another victim of Ace’s indiscriminate dogging.
Unknown - After Hokusai
Ace
A guy with a street artist’s sense of integrity and honour, with a 6 year stretch served and a burning self righteousness is obviously going to take offence. So C215 took advantage of a return visit to London this week to very very publicly reck revenge on a pile of ACE stuff, laying down the law and up-holding his honour in the process.
C215 (also pictured - Cauty)
C215
C215
This is what happens on the streets. This one may prove to yet have legs.
No comments:
Post a Comment