NoArt is a French artist born in 1965. The first part of his artistic career was spent recreating and revisiting impossible worlds, linked to the teeming imaginations of Jules Verne or J. M. Barrie, in a Steam Punk aesthetic, close to the urban scene and other subcultures, while at the same time branching out in all the other directions available to his imagination.
From this period, NoArt retains a taste for fun and the re-enchantment of an imperfect world. Over the past 10 years, the lumino-kinetic universe has burst into the artist’s practice, falsely transposing it into the field of design, sometimes mixed with a kitsch aesthetic, the better to hijack the codes of contemporary society. The playfulness is there, and the return to games of form and language are the weapons of a Peter Pan who has come of age, but who still, as a slightly mad inventor, takes a disillusioned look at our daily lives: turning everything upside down to create a laugh of resistance.
With bling, rhinestones and sequins seemingly reflecting money and power, NoArt thumbs its nose at them. Thus, from its safes (luminous mirrors reflecting wealth ad infinitum), armored rickshaw (symbolizing the point of tension between the haves and the have-nots) and Offshore Machines (money-laundering washing machines), to its ATMs and full-scale vault, NoArt exposes the excesses of obsession and thirst for money.
In a mirror effect, he pokes fun at himself, but nonetheless proposes a different path, one as rooted in science fiction as ever: wormholes that are like gateways to elsewhere, or Organic modules where the machine seems to come alive, and the light a flow of soothing, comforting energy. Always playing with appearances and trompe l’œil, the magic works and we’re faced with a choice: connivance and impertinence or escapism.
