Wxyz (1980) - "322-1"

today, instead of seeking a wall, Wxyz creates it. 322-1 is born from the evolution of Wxyz's work: shifting from graffiti practice to an in-depth search around urban matter. For many years, his playground was the public space. He painted on walls, but what interested him was not only the gesture of graffiti. He primarily sought to make his intervention dialogue with the support rather than cover it entirely. The wall was an integral part of the artwork.
He sought virgin walls, those that had never been painted, whose surfaces had already been transformed by time. Concrete, traces of humidity or successive coats of paint formed a vocabulary he did not want to erase. These materials absorbed the paint, held it back, revealed it differently. They already carried a memory.
Wxyz never painted places intended to disappear from his daily life. He intervened in the quartiers where he lived. These walls were part of his familiar landscape. By painting them, he did not seek to conquer territory; he transformed the landscape in which he himself would continue to evolve. Over time, he understood that he might be addressing less the passersby than himself, the one he would be a few days, a few months, or a few years later.
Gradually, urban matter became the true subject of his work.
Today, concrete, wood, sandstone or bronze become testing grounds where matter is modeled, dug, patinated, sometimes painted. His gesture remains that of intervention, but his support is now sculpted.
322-1 was born during the confinement, when Wxyz shared much of his time in his workshop with his son. Until then, his work was essentially built around the four last letters of the alphabet — W, X, Y and Z. Through their exchanges, he understood that these forms did not evoke the same emotion as a silhouette able to evoke a presence. He gradually abandoned the letter in favor of a deliberately elemental figure, located somewhere between the character, the building and the sign.
His son saw a living being; he saw a form simple enough and abstract enough to continue speaking of the city.
322-1 is not a character in the narrative sense. It is a fragment of urban matter that takes shape. A portion of the city become presence.
What interests Wxyz in the city is not its order, but everything that escapes it. He grew up surrounded by concrete, right angles and façades designed to be smooth, regular, almost clinical. Yet no architecture remains intact. Cracks, crumbling, repairs, demolitions or overlays of materials are as many accidents that reveal time and human presence. It is precisely these places that feed his research.
When a building is demolished, interior walls suddenly come to light. Wallpapers, layers of paint or traces of use become visible whereas they were meant to stay hidden. Wxyz loves the idea that walls possess a form of intimacy. They quietly preserve the traces of lives that have passed through them, until an event reveals them.
The name 322-1 refers to Article 322-1 of the French Penal Code, which punishes deliberate damage to another's property. It is under this qualification that graffiti interventions are most often designated.
Wxyz chose this name as a wink and as a reversal of perspective. He never recognized himself in a vision of graffiti reduced to destruction. The artists who inspired him sought above all to contribute something to the public space, to establish a dialogue with the city rather than degrade it. Painting a wall has always been, for him, a way of offering something to a place: a message sent, without knowing whether it would be received, understood or accepted. Thus the name 322-1 preserves the trace of this contradiction: an intention to share that, legally, fell under degradation.
Each 322-1 is designed as a fragment of urban matter. A portion of the city that preserves traces of time, uses and human presences. A matter that, by transforming, ends up telling a bit of what it has lived through.