On the program for this Urban Art Riviera episode 8, César Malfi receives Olivia Paroldi, a street artist with techniques as varied as they are unusual.
Indeed, this artist resident at the Suquet des artistes in Cannes uses engraving, collage and sketching in her creations. Having practiced engraving for 15 years, this artist has mastered the secrets of this ancestral art, in particular one of its most demanding forms, the print, which she mixes with the processes of urban art.
Watch this eighth episode below to discover his creative process.
The ephemeral dimension of urban art
The particularity of this technique is first of all to create a work that will be ephemeral by nature. César Malfi underlines the subtle relationship of the relationship to time that is established between the ephemeral work in the urban space and the engraving plate which, itself, persists in the artist's studio, thus creating an unexpected relationship between the urban artist and his private studio.
Asked about the frustration that could be caused by the disappearance of her works, Olivia Paroldi on the contrary draws a poetic parallel between the ephemeral nature of her works and the finitude of human existence.
In this regard, César Malfi reminds us that urban art is above all contextual, generally considered in relation to its spatial environment. Adding a temporal dimension to this creates an even more unique context for a work.
Children's rights, the common thread of Olivia Paroldi's creation
The International Convention on the Rights of the Child is a leitmotif in Olivia Paroldi's artistic approach.
With them, she feels a purity of the present moment that she seeks to preserve through her works. As part of one of her projects, she recently went to a Ukrainian orphanage to meet children who had experienced the horrors of war to lead creative workshops. She led a graphic bridge with the children of a school in Cannes by exchanging drawings, with the aim of creating a fresco bringing together the imaginations of these children with such different realities.
César Malfi, who likes to echo the child in each of us through his works, can only approve and describes the purity of a child's approach, of his candor in understanding the world.
This search for the innocence of childhood builds a touching bridge between the worlds of the two artists.
Finally, besides childhood, Olivia Paroldi is also interested in memory and time. She collected the memories of women over 80 years old who had always lived in Calvi, made engravings and sketches of the mental images that this evoked for her, before creating urban installations in the places evoked within these memories.
Finally, César highlights the way in which Olivia takes a delicate and subtle look at the subjects she chooses to address with her art.