I am a french artist, i would like to share my work with you.

Last year while travelling in Brazil I went to a Vik Muniz exhibition and I was amazed by his use of media. Every piece of material he uses is considered and appropriate to the subject matter. The piece that really stuck with me was a giant world map made up entirely of old computer parts. I started to look at floppy disks and the importance that they have had on the development of our data-driven world.

My first piece of work using floppy disks as a canvas was an image of a fingerprint. To me, this connected the data world with the human physical form using the theme of identity, albeit in an obvious way. After that I looked at using the disks in a grid to create photo-fits, constructing imaginary faces and identities that could draw connections to the personal information stored on the disks. By chance I found that the metal circular hub on the reverse side of the disk worked well as a metaphor for the human eye. This development was quite important to me, as the eyes of a person can reveal their identity and inner feelings. In the film Blade Runner they use the Voight-Kampff test, which gauges the reaction of the eyes to a set of carefully selected questions in order to determine if the subject is human or android. I sometimes like to cross out or obscure the eyes, as if to somehow protect the identity of the subject.

Each piece starts with either some preparatory sketching of an imaginary person, or searching for images of random people online. The image is then mapped into a grid, with each section the size of one disk. Spray paint is applied to the disks using a stencil to preserve the label and metal slider. Preserving the labels is key, as the handwriting and scribbling are integral to the personality and history of each piece. Elements of people’s lives are stored on the disks and although that data can never be accessed again I like to preserve some of that for viewing. Sometimes I leave the disks as they are and rip parts of the label off to create the shapes that I need. The disks are then placed in tonally appropriate areas, almost like pixels, to create a collage. On top of this I start sketching the outline of the head and the features in pencil, with oil paint to finish the details. This process is quite selective as only certain features are finished completely. I like to leave a lot unfinished as it allows the viewer to see the layers, showing how the work has been created.

I always try and get people to donate the disks and tapes to me but usually I have to buy them online. Over the years billions upon billions of disks and tapes have been manufactured and today they are widely regarded as junk. This makes them an affordable thing to make art with. Maybe in time they will become very rare and the opportunity for creating art in this way will have passed. Reusing objects that would ordinarily have been sent to landfill makes a comment on the throwaway culture of today. Maybe this work can encourage people to think more creatively about the objects that are deemed to be obsolete or useless. Everything has a life cycle and we have become accustomed to look for the next shiny new thing once something has become slightly old and worn. This approach leads to a lot of waste and I think that reinventing something has more charm than things that are created from scratch. What brings the work to life is that blend of the nostalgic and familiar, together with the freshness of a new form of expression.

I live in Camden and work in my studio in Dalston, in East London. I find living in London to be very inspirational with the amazing mix of people that we have here.

Gephart draws inspiration from fantastic realism, satiric imagery, culture jamming, asian ink-painting, Pop Art and Graffiti. His text-inspired works focus on the hidden motifs of his characters, but also sample the pleasure of tragic humor as a consequence of human adaption and mainstream.
Felix Gephart received a Fulbright grant and graduated with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

His work has been internationally featured amongst others by Novum, DIE ZEIT, Illusive, Graphische Kunst, Empty magazine, Dpi magazine, Playboy magazine and Esquire magazine. In October 2009, 80 drawings were shown on the occasion of his solo show at the A. Paul Weber Museum, Ratzeburg.

Artist statement:
I have always had an eye for the strange beauty in the grotesqueries of life; This appreciation is now very evident in work that I am making. Inspired by the relationship between dreams, natural world and the emptiness of consumer culture, between safe childhood playing to everyday marks of reality I bring and create a new type of creatures in my imaginary world. It is a whole range of characters from the ones in darker corners of the streets of soulless cities to the safe and pure creatures from imagination in my wonderland trying through them to prove that I have never grown up, or at least have never lost touch with my innocent childhood self.

My body of work is built of this melancholy interaction between man-made status symbols and frozen moments of the utopian childhood memories. In my work I often flirt with different typefaces, superimposing pieces of print on top of my illustrations, or using them as part of the drawings. I often use draws in black ink on top of these collages, using all kind of hand written scribbles often, which pull the focus of the work back from the adult world to the realms of childhood. This experimenting with more text and new techniques led me to emerging of very personal style.

The characters i paint may seem like some creatures from another dimension, real but unreal, sometimes very closely connected with childhood, playful and inventive, sometimes abandoned and tragically sad and full of misery. But i think they are simply us, modern society without it’s masks, without the fake presentations that make us acceptable to whatever group we are a part of. Yet the only place where we are truly revealed the way we really are is one from the inside. We all share feelings of fear and loneliness. We all sometimes feel ugly and insecure.

If you examine my work closely, you might come to the realization that my creatures are really kind of self portraits, set in a fantastical landscapes of imaginary world which echoes of her own… a bitter, yet sweetly coated prescription for modern life.

Its aim, born from a precise editorial choice, is collecting and exhibiting the work of visual artists in a pure form. Presenting it simply as data itself: no artist bio, no critical analysis of the works, no extra info that could in any way distract from the innediate impact the work has on the watcher.

DAYDREAMING MAGAZINE November 2009 ONLINE

“RAPTUROUS NATURE”
The quarrel between man, nature and art, Unavoidable down the centuries, is a matter worthy an endless soap-opera. For or against, willing or not, the artist has always brood in his own shadow over the lunatic terror for the fact that his creation wouldn’t have bear the comparison with Mother Earth. Many took their distance, other ridiscover her right now, some did never abandon her. The confrontation’s just begun…

Inside:

Nanni Spano (Metamorphosis):
High definition and macro modality investigating on details and texture of algas, of cortex, on stones and leaves, have unattendedly penetrated from other image-worlds with a violent meanwhile classical synthesis. While we’re expecting the image to be clear and still like crystal, meeting our visual pleasure, the artist contaminates and melts its elements and sense, slipping in the disquiet for an impossible unalterability- (G. Carbi)

Dan May (Illustrations):
A fairy Arcadia is being illustrated, populated with Beauty-nymphs and Beast-satyrs, fainting infancy and insects. Melancholic poetry enlighted masterfully from the inside.

Heiko Muller (Drawing/Mixed Media/Oil):
Through an unconventional use of stylistic sovrapposition, the artist lets us attend a very interesting mediation between the expressive medium and the natural datum, between illustration and photography, between Pop echoes and Action paintings, breathing life into a powerful and immediate iconography confronting nature and history.

Scott G.Brooks (Painting):
Here’s the umpteenth violence to the american dream, far from being gratuitous, together with the umpteenth homage to renaissance art, far from being imitation. Deformities legitimates themselves with confident looks of disquieting wellbeing; distortion meets smiling our eye. What if the world was this?

De Becker ( Into the wild):
The transposition of the urban subject in the natural datum, fundamental intuition, provokes a grotesque disorientation, but not only… the gamut of sensations provided by these images indicates a relational investigation between man and nature that is far from being unveiled.