Looks like OX got Up After All

Looks like OX got up after all.

OX-Central Park Arrest In January of 1985

Photo by Bill Cunningham

This is an image OX sent me from France. It's of him and friends being arrested for posting their artwork in Central Park in January of 1985. Who even wheat pasted in 1985? Awesome!

Photo by Masto

Before I had a chance to post on the arrest photo above, OX sent me this image of him and Closky from around the same time period. This gives you a better idea of what kind of wheat paste imagery they were putting up. Check the jackets, also by Closky.

French Artist OX Answers A Few Of PublicAdCampaign's Questions

Every once in a while we come across an artist whose work seems to be very in line with our own over here at PublicAdCampaign. We like to ask them a few questions about their intentions and motivations. French artist OX took the time to answer our request and the results are given below.


Why do you create work in the public?

I do not create my works in public, however I do install them in public places. First, I select locations by closely examining a specific area, then I do the painting in my studio, and only then is it installed outside in public view. I see my work as “installation” rather than “performance”. It is a very free way of envisaging artistic production.

Why do you create work over/using outdoor advertising?

I have always thought that billboards, because they are similar to huge paintings hung in the landscape, provide an extraordinary support on which to show my paintings. At the beginning, I used them only as a means for bringing my work to the public eye and to publicize it in a quick and effective way, but without giving the surrounding context any particular attention. Currently, my art is the same but I now take the site into account, up to the point even where it often dictates my graphic choices and I sometimes leave pieces of the advertising image visible.

Tell us something about where you live and your relationship to your city.

I live in Bagnolet, a suburb less than 1 km outside Paris, where I have pasted more than 130 posters on free-expression-panels (designed for non-commercial posters) over a period of 4 years. I imagine the town as a recreation ground, which I view as a three-dimensional composition in which I place disturbing visual elements, whose presence will become a sort of photographic still life.

How would you describe your relationship with advertising?

Advertising is omnipresent in our lives, it feeds our consumer addiction, it exploits and recycles artistic creation and it finances it. It forms a part of my imagination, I draw on its imagery to create and I use its means to communicate. Although I sometimes divert it’s meaning, I do not have the pretension of fighting it.

Having done both, is there a difference between working in France and New York?

Yes, there is a difference. I think it is less risky to practice this art in France. With the Ripoulins in New York in 1985, there were no billboards available for my work, so I pasted my paintings directly on worksite boardings or private walls and even on a roof at Central Park, which caused problems with the owners and the police, and we were even taken to court. I no longer work in this manner.

Tell us one of your favorite moments working on the street.

Without a doubt, the very first time I pasted my work on a billboard! More recently, a favorite moment was one very cold winter morning when I had to mix antifreeze with my paste and then climb onto my slippery car roof to carry out my art billposting, even though I was alone it was a moment of jubilation. And of course, there are many other memorable times.

If you could run a fantasy camp, what would it be?

At first, when I read this question, I imagined Fantasy Camp to mean a sort of combination between Spring Break and a Hippy group, where you do body painting in the setting sun . . . . then I thought of two projects I worked on, one in which I took part called “Holidays and Painting”, and another project which has never been carried out : “Festival of Color”.

My idea would be to propose a range of actions to enable people to celebrate their favorite colors.

French Artist OX - Another New Favorite

I was just introduced to an artist hailing from France by the name of OX. He often works over outdoor advertising in bright colorful patterns and images that somewhat remind me of MOMO's work in it's simplicity. The fact that he makes no commentary directly about the ad content, but instead is interested in the formal qualities of his city, couldn't make me more excited. The results are billboards which demand your attention not because of their content but because of their lack of it. That moment where you wonder what you are looking at, who put it there and why it asks nothing of you. In my own work I attempt to achieve a similar relationship with the viewer where noticing the work causes you to question our cities use as message boards as opposed to artistic canvases.

The below image is a fantastic image OX sent me from a trip of his to NYC in the 80's. Oh history!