Arnaud Puig "ARDPG" (1980) - Versus

ARDPG, the pseudonym of Arnaud Puig, is a French artist born in 1980 in Périgueux and living today in Bordeaux. Coming from graffiti culture, which he discovers and practices from the 1990s, he gradually develops a pictorial practice that goes beyond traditional street art. Parallel to his artistic practice, he studies art history at the university, training that deeply nourishes his approach and his visual imagination. His work thus sits at the crossroads of several worlds: 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 a 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 old compositions — often appear on the canvas, then are disturbed, covered, or pierced by signs derived from graffiti: words, typographies, gestural lines, or graphic marks.

The term Versus evokes the idea of a duel, but with ARDPG this opposition becomes above all a visual dialogue. Scholarly references and street codes intertwine, respond to one another 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 pictorial tradition 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 a common impulse: to leave a trace, to mark a surface, and to transmit 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.

In this work he combines collage as a travel notebook with graffiti to create an ensemble that takes us on a journey through the history of art.