Arnaud Puig "ARDPG" (1980) - Versus

The artist ARDPG, the pseudonym of Arnaud Puig, is a French artist born in 1980 in Périgueux and living today in Bordeaux. Coming from the graffiti culture which he discovers and practices from 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 the university, a training that deeply nourishes his approach and his visual imagination. His work thus sits at the crossroads of several universes: classical painting, urban culture, and contemporary plastic experiments. Through painting, collage, typography, or 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 directions of his work. In these works, the artist stages a true 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 unsettled, covered, or traversed by signs from graffiti: words, typographies, gestural marks, or graphic traces.

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 interlace, respond to each other, and sometimes clash on the surface of the canvas. The artist thus creates hybrid images where the past and present superimpose, revealing unexpected links between painting 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 the same 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 a unified whole that takes us on a journey through the history of art.