M. Wassup’s making of

Some of us travel with a watercolor book to sketch the world with the tip of the brush, but others sketches it with the caps on subways, and walls. Wassup book of travels is all over his Instagram account, a day to day journey printed on plane tickets like a collection. Although it seems to be a travel book, it is also an artistic issue.

I am under the impression that we are experiencing vacations for months, they started like six months ago in March everything is lasting like August only too long. Lockdown had me tackled my articles through the unfamiliar of some Youtube, or Instagram accounts from writers around the world. At the ends of the earth impossible to travel to when Schengen was closed, and now that we are almost free but not totally. I am about to say again: yes it is disorienting to scroll Instagram writers’accounts from Miami to Jakarta. I see myself watching a 1up short movie painting a subway in Berlin under climes penetrated by flashes of fireworks, people were stunned. I also see myself watching photos of Kivi’s of the beach of Odessa, or San’s photos of Honolulu. Those photos are not only important because they refer to something essential when the distance offers the possibility. Those accounts provide for action photos, live atmosphere, portrait.

Among them, you have M.Wassup’s account, with block letters LOVE through Europe, Asia, or South America. Some pictures show letters on various trains from Italy, Germany, Swedish, and boats from Bali, graceful under Indonesian climes, where the shadows of the palm leaf stripe the colors spread out to the walls. Most of the photos which gather information about it seem to be jealously preserved from intrusive eyes. Like his letters on a train in Sao Paulo, drooped, we get to see very little, more a panoramic picture of the city, gloomy comment. Or the ones on Moscovite subway where we get the perfect head of the machine breaking off the convergence lines with its tubular box. Wassup creates a mysterious atmosphere out of his letters.

Enigmas ruptured that Wassup seems to prefer to maintain with poetic intervals (the study of the creative process). Pixels spout out of the scintillation of a wire wheel machine bumping into a subway door. A cloud of paint only visible because of a light bulb glistening inside a tunnel somewhere in the world. Those photos limit how we perceive the work to introduce the process of creation. They free the paint from the “esthesis” (how we perceive the work) of a frontal camera angle, it looks despotic, upon its throne. Just like an anamorphosis, those camera angles create a new perspective where the blue of the sky plays with the obscurity of the metropolitan labyrinth, where the horizon of the sun breaks those of the tiles of its stations. The look of a female spectator wearing or not a bikini, it abolishes the dryness of a picture purely informative. They put the paint in context, and they tell what was going on during the creative process, they make it alive.

Poetry intensifies these camera angles where sometimes we see the painters go through by narrow entries, some verticals dizzying tubes, some never-ending ways along the railways, forbidden support like an excellent fruit…those pictures to seize those attitudes calculating the space and the time parameters to measure their work comparing them to the excessiveness of the big cities and their complexity, capturing the gestures of the painting bigger due to the length of the work, imposing, on enormous support as well; prominent ride horse onto the head of that big iron horse resting under surveillance inside its underground stable; and the last shots of the getaway blocked; we could think that the process of creation could end up here. Coming out of that improvised workshop, where the day to day life seems to be put on hold. But the air of the surface can not announce the end of the act of the interventionism of the artists from the 70s and the beginning of everyday life again.

The air puts its continuity together, the logical sequel of the process of creation which feed itself from life, one you can not lockdown inside the claustrophobic atmosphere of the studio. The set of pictures which are defined as the unusual Wassup’s travel book could be taken along a coastal path, the curve of a craggy road, a private parking lot. That making of which is not affordable to any passenger or walker who then becomes a spectator is not just a bonus. It gives life to the painting by revealing all the performative process, the complexity of the painter’s context. They reveal the evolutionism of the modification the painter made. The piece of work does not spout spontaneously anymore on the support as a creationist act it elaborates in life. The ordinary which feeds the painting, which takes possession of the man, and alters by its presence. By replacing the usual nobility repository of the frame to use it as a support, could we consider that the transposition of the alteration paint announces the desire to honor the daily?