Arnaud Puig "ARDPG" (1980) - Versus

The artist ARDPG, the pseudonym of Arnaud Puig, is a French artist born in 1980 in Périgueux and currently living in Bordeaux. Coming from graffiti culture, which he discovers and practices since the 1990s, he gradually develops a pictorial work that goes beyond the traditional street art framework. Alongside his artistic practice, he studies art history at university, a training that deeply nourishes his approach and his visual imagination. His work thus sits at the crossroads of several worlds: that of classical painting, urban culture, and contemporary plastic experiments. Through painting, collage, typography, or even interventions in public space, ARDPG explores the tensions and possible dialogues between these different visual heritages.

This reflection finds particularly strong expression in his series VERSUS, which has become one of the major axes of his work. In these works, the artist stages a genuine aesthetic confrontation between the history of art and contemporary urban culture. Figures inspired by classical painting — faces, portraits, or fragments of ancient compositions — often appear on the canvas, then are disturbed, covered, or traversed by signs drawn from graffiti: words, typographies, gestural lines, or graphic marks.

The term Versus evokes the idea of a duel, but for ARDPG this opposition becomes more of a visual dialogue. Scholarly references and street codes interweave, respond to each other, and sometimes clash on the surface of the canvas. The artist thus creates hybrid images where the past and the present overlap, revealing the unexpected links between traditional painting and the spontaneous energy of graffiti.

Through the VERSUS series, ARDPG questions the hierarchy often established between institutional art and urban practices. By confronting these two worlds, he suggests that they actually share the same impulse: to leave a trace, to mark a surface, and to convey a vision. His works thus become spaces of tension but also of reconciliation, where the history of art and contemporary culture meet to form a new visual language.