Mr Lolo

In 1987, after meeting with poet and femme fatale Miss.Tic, Mr. Lolo decided to devote himself entirely to the street stencil adventure. Together, they walk the streets of Paris, go to bistros in Pigalle and trendy clubs: they are inseparable. The race against the cops, always keen to hunt down anyone caught vandalising the public space, often ends badly and they end up behind bars.

Mr. Lolo’s work contains various aesthetic, cultural and sexual paradoxes. The multiple and the unique. Darkness and brilliance. Decadence and purity. The street and the boudoir. Potion and poison. Dual identity. This permanent game of duplicity is reflected in his subjects and in his technique in equal measure.

Some think there is nothing more unsophisticated in terms of pictorial technique than the stencil. The use of cut-outs and spray cans generally creates “flat, simple works, doomed to rapid degradation and multiple uses.

With a level of skill borne of devotion, Mr. Lolo asserts and proves the opposite. He reinterprets stencils and sublimates them. His fine sense of detail, as seen among the Art Nouveau painters and poster designers such as Alfons Mucha, is a game-changer.

According to Philippe Fontaine, his stencils seem to have been cut not with a box cutter, but a scalpel; their precision is surgical. Through the use of mixed techniques, blending acrylic, ink spray and sequins, his portraits have a special volume and thickness, a particular expressiveness, a fragile side but also a troubled one. The use of the stencil, whose main purpose is to multiply the work almost infinitely, is denied: his works are unique. The addition of hand-glued sequins enhances the contrast by creating a shiny gold or silver effect.

Works available