Every winter the outdoor pool of Molitor hosts an artistic installation.
This year, Retro has dressed the art deco pool with a monumental installation, a 25-metre long fluorescent pink jellyfish.
Floating above the swimmers, Medousa reminds us that in these uncertain times, it can be salutary to let oneself be carried by the natural currents of life. The artist having left Paris for Saint-Malo (Brittany), wants through this performance to bring the spectator to question the concept of « letting go ».
If by day Medousa impresses by its size, by night, illuminated by spotlights, it takes on another dimension. Its proportions allow us to play on the scales of size, inverting the order of things: the human being is thus tiny, a simple spectator transported to the bottom of the ocean.
Retro now lives by the sea and rubs shoulders with fishermen every day, so the use of the fishing net came naturally. It allows the creation of a massive work while keeping this transparency which never hides the architecture, imposing but all in lightness.
The artist chose a fluorescent pink colour to tint several hundred square metres of net. This shade fits perfectly with the hotel’s setting and its emblematic colours, ochre and blue, allowing the viewer’s eye to be caught by this touch of modernity in this art deco landmark.
Produced with the cultural engineering agency We Are So Art Addict | WASAA, the jellyfish was designed to have the lowest possible environmental impact. The net comes from Brittany, ennobled (dyed) in Ardèche and the aluminium of the structure comes from Île de France. The elements that make up this installation come mainly from France.
MOLITOR
13 rue Nungesser et coli – 75016 Paris
Inaugurated in 1929, Molitor was the most popular swimming pool in Paris for 60 years. Closed in 1989 and classified as a historical monument, the building was then taken over by graffiti artists who turned it into a huge field of expression and, little by little, the temple of the Parisian underground.
Street artists from all over the world left their mark there, from New York legend Seen to Parisian Psyckoze, via the Gouzou of the Reunionese Jace
Art will never leave Molitor, whether in the hotel lobby or in the blue cabins of the winter pool.
RETRO GRAFFITISM
» Coming from the graffiti scene of the 1990s, Toons gradually abandoned the street for the studio before returning in the early 2010s under the name of Retro Graffitism. A new name for a new approach, nourished by multiple influences through which he now addresses the greatest number of people.
Nicolas Gzeley
Self-taught and versatile, Retro plays with codes, styles and traditions to produce narrative works. Comics, mythology, classical literature, artistic movements, architecture, typography, underground culture… Retro mixes different universes, often distant in space and time, which collide according to his imagination.
Through his work destructuring, restructuring, sampling and visual sampling, Retro moves from drawing to installation, painting or sculpture, and proposes graphic objects with a single objective: to tell universal stories that everyone can appropriate according to their own sensitivity. »
WASAA
We Are So Art Addict | WASAA is a cultural engineering agency working with many French and international artists, from the Urban Art scene. It is, among other things, at the origin of the Underground Effect festival (Urban Week of Paris La Défense) with >100 artists, 80 000 visitors UE#5, for which it managed the curating and production, of numerous walls and of the online gallery street-art-addict.com.
We Are So Art Addict | WASAA was the delegated producer of the Medousa project.
Further information
Issam Khemir : +33 6 59 45 25 56
hello@wearesoartaddict.com
Artist
@retrograffitism
medousa-art.com
Molitor
@molitorparis
molitorparis.com
Free access
7/7 from 8 am to 11 pm