Chifumi & Croyal - (FR)

As his pseudonym might let you guess, Chifumi’s work is akin to a vast playground where he is the one to make the rules. Not without a certain casualness, combined with an aversion to authority, does he begin to investigate the streets, wearing tattoos all over his arms : Dense typographic compositions, equivocal expressions raging. “Emeute”, “Révolte”, “Traître”, “Meurtre” …, constitute a lexicon that paraphrases the ultra–violent discourse of gangs and other mob bosses. A discourse that stands for a precisely establishedprotocol of drug traffickers and the parallel market aristocracy.

Chifumi does not really belong to this environment, but he talks about it, acting as a craftsman, committed to the urban mythology.

“Une histoire du tatouage” is the fruit of a collaboration between Chifumi and Julien Croyal, previously both based in Mulhouse (France).

It is a polymorphic installation including video and painting, focusing on different tattoo eras: from the times when only bandits wore tattoos, when Gulag prisoners or convicts from the “bagne” of the Belle Epoque joined in, up to those times, when tattoos were worn by Americans in the twilight of the 1940`s.