LUCE & Eltono - (ES)

Luce (Valencia, 1989.)
Despite the fact that he is now taking a training course connected with carpentry (CIPFP, Catarroja) he considers himself a selftaught artist. It was not until he focused his artistic career that he became interested in academic training. He started working in the streets of Valencia on an independent basis, but he has also participated in festivals and projects in different cities in Spain and France. He currently works with the Dada Studios gallery, Barcelona.

The first contact between the artist and public space was through graffiti, understood as writing his own name: writing it the more times the better and in the largest number of possible places.This practice led to flourishing questions that went beyond painting itself; questions that made him understand the city and the people that inhabited it.

The name LUCE is one he writes the most. He highlights its legibility, the places where it is written and the use of wood. There is a change generated by the use of this material, as the artist starts to work with volume, creating new relations with space and encouraging his creative process. Little by little the name disappears, in the search for more freedom within the space and adding new materials to keep on interchanging his particular way of understanding and moving around the metropolis.

Eltono
is a French artist born in the suburbs of Paris in 1975. His work is mostly influenced by his graffiti background. He started painting around 1989 in his neighborhood mostly on train tracks and highway walls. "Eltono focused mainly on the railway lines to the northwest of the city, painting in the traditional silver and black, block letter Parisian style."

He lived in Madrid from 1999 to 2010 (where he got his pseudonym), then in Beijing from 2010 to 2014 and since 2014 lives in the south of France. In 1999, while living in Madrid, he started painting abstract symbols with tape and acrylic paint. "It was then that he developed the colorful geometric box patterns for which he is now known." "As Eltono himself suggested, his move away from traditional graffiti was produced so as to find a harmony with both the material and the social body of the city (integrating both its architectonic and societal elements in a more consensual manner)." "Eltono also rejects conventional letterforms in favor of a minimalism device with which to negotiate space."

Eltono's work is mainly influenced by the urban environment and questions the limits between public and private space. He uses the term "public space artist" to describe his practice. When showing his work in galleries and museums, he focuses on finding a coherent way to show street art in private spaces. "[Eltono's] career in both the street and the galleries, is an example of a certain ethic of sustained work, oblivious to everything, which creates its own parameters and builds its own audience."