First monography dedicated to the Street Pop artist, Benjamin Spark

FIRST MONOGRAPH EDITED BY THE PUBLISHING CIRCLE OF ART, PARIS

The French editions Circle Art present the first monograph devoted to the Franco-Belgian Street Pop artist Benjamin Spark. A look back at his work from 2008 to 2016, which marks a transition between two periods.

All texts in the book were written by Stéphane Corréard, critic, journalist, curator, collector and director of the contemporary art department of Cornette de Saint Cyr study in Paris. The preface was written by Erró, global monument of Pop Art and Narrative Figuration hero

The book is in all the best bookstores in Belgium and France  in September 2016.

Spark, sounds like a brilliant onomatopoeia, the sound of an uppercut or a brutal collision, like his work! The brush in boiling, he lives and works in Brussels for 10 years. Benjamin Spark pedigree jumps in figure: son of Pop and Street Art, he embodies unprecedented reconciliation, that of the two cultures from the street, unlikely but inevitable meeting of these two movements. Benjamin Spark arises in fifty years of heir visual culture taking root in a pictorial project whose scale will truly been considered by his master Erró which since the late fifties, explored systematically all conceivable ways combine images, adopting successively, and sometimes simultaneously, all possible collisions.

The peculiarity of this Spark is superimposed on the picture combinations kinds of grids, drawn as hastily in black or white, like chalk or a trait marker angry, which in addition to adding a clearly aggressive dimension to the image, are rattling "clear line" and "dirty line," adding a layer of illegibility, jamming, the table surface. In these paintings, slogans in the form of injunctions, emerging magma of images. He is definitely a genre painter, focusing on the picturesque daily life, seen through the eyes of a specific category of individuals: superheroes. They have the ultimate power to strike the mind, and penetrate all the layers of consciousness. Spark rejects major signifiers themes, historical or religious, scholarly allegories. He deliberately commonplace in a "big bang" pictorial, where the eye does not know where to turn, over-loaded, embedded in an ocean of images and signifiers in which the painter wants to enter the world of bubbling on the stage, without mitigating or noise or fury, but placing them in the foreground. The pictorial process Benjamin Spark inexorably ends in a kind of facial dripping where intertwine all fears but also the hopes of today, without clearly possible to isolate each other. And if the choice of characters and their expressions are not the result of chance, everyone will find his own narration. A style-synthesis of European Street Art and Pop Art American, Spark gives the name of Street Pop.