The lawn under the Eiffel Tower in Paris is, in a way, sacred. Though thousands of people cut their way through it every day, the locals and tourists sit on the picnic blankets and at the same time serve the Champs de Mars as a place to venture Parisian pet dogs, so far no artist has ever been given permission to use the grassy area for their work. Only now Saype, a thirty-year-old Frenchman with his own name, Guillaume Legros.
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Saype is considered one of the latest French street art and graffiti sensations. He is the so-called "rural graffiti artist," because he does not spray his paintings on the gray street facades of houses or walls, but he has created his own original way: he paints giant biodegradable images on vast stretches of grass. It uses a special, flour-based, pigment-based, and milk-based blend based on its own recipes.
Portraits with message
Saype began with an ultra-realistic depiction of portraits of local people - whether they were female faces on fields in the French Alps, a senior on the slopes of the Swiss Alps, or a child in a Russian clearing. But more recently, he has become a street performer rather than a rural artist - with his works heading to cities where famous parks turn into a giant canvas visible only from the sky. They produce portraits responding to the current climate or refugee crisis.
For example, last year on a lawn in the center of Geneva, he created a giant fresco of a girl with her hand outstretched to a paper boat on the lake, paying tribute to the SOS Méditerranée humanitarian organization, which saves the lives of migrants cruising on shaky crowded ships.
The Beyond Walls project, which is currently under construction in Paris, follows this Geneva. Hundreds of square meters will be covered by a chain of connected human hands. These will be images based on the photographs of the hands of the people who attended last year's SOS Méditerranée gala evening, where some of the rescued refugees were missing, besides rescuers, sailors and patrons. In the next three years, the image of this "human chain" or "symbol of togetherness", as the project designates, should decorate the lawns in cities across the world.
Sprayer from the village
The theme of "coexistence", moving across borders and reminding history is close to Saype. His grandparents were part of the French resistance movement Résistance in the countryside in the east of France during World War II and died after being deported.
Unlike most famous street artists, Saype did not grow up in the suburbs of a large city, but comes from the small village of Évette-Salbert near the Swiss border. His mother worked in a radiology hospital, an IT father and little Guillaume Legros never really wanted to do it. "I've never been to a museum or exhibition as a child," he admitted to the British newspaper The Guardian.
He came into contact with graffiti at the age of thirteen when he saw him as a kind of adrenaline and "a chance to survive in society". He started classically - on remote walls of tennis courts, abandoned house facades, then he switched to bridges and shut down trains. Soon he moved to ultrarealistic portraits, photographing people in the Paris subway and then painting them in black and white.
For years he has combined his passion for street art with the work of a medical brother, which has inspired him. The daily confrontation of the nurse with human suffering, aging, and illness had forced him to paint portraits. So far, he chose mainly young children or vice versa, because "you usually can't find seniors in street art".
How to draw attention to yourself
Gradually, he moved from the city to the green. "I felt that urban art had lost some of its significance. There is so much visual pollution in towns that no one has seen it properly. So I wanted to find another way to attract people's attention," he explains.
The decisive factor for him was that his color did not damage the grass and leave no traces on it. It took a year to explore the ideal composition of its biodegradable paint by experimenting in the garden of its parents. First, it creates a paste from the flour and water that is applied to the lawn and creates a temporarily waterproof surface to which it applies paints - white, for example, made from chalk, black from charcoal.
The creation of the work itself is an extraordinarily demanding logistic event, when it has to carefully unpaint the area with the help of volunteers and then blindly paint the set areas. There is no time or space for improvisation, so the Paris project, which uses a total of 1300 liters of paint, has been planning for months.
When the image is unveiled on June 15, it will take about two days for people to carry it out on their shoes. "It's part of art," he says.
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