Victor Ash
* born 1968 in Portugal
* lived and worked in Paris, France, from 1972 to 1996; today lives in Copenhagen, Denmark
* wall paintings, stencils, cut-outs, installations
Victor Ash, according to himself, is a self-taught artist. His artistic career started off – along the lines of the graffiti motto “learning by doing and trialy and error” – in the early 1980s on the streets of Paris. At that time still influenced by the popular and style-forming New York subway graffiti, Ash’s works underwent a sustained developmental process through the impacting forces to be found in the wide range of places that he lived.
Yet one of the persistently recurring thematic areas of emphasis in the work of the Portuguese-born artist has remained the relationship between animal and human, the interplay between civilization and nature, as well as the direct confrontation between these two experiential worlds that are in effect very different. For example, Ash combines a bleak, technologized landscape reminiscent of junk yards with a detailed, fauna-rich mountainous world. Here deer, mountain goats, and wolves are juxtaposed with the transience of consumer goods – and the viewer is invited to explore this ambivalent world and its captivating images.
His images seem as if they have been produced with a stencil, but this first quick glance at the photo-realistic-seeming works is deceptive: Victor Ash remains faithful to the earliest established graffiti techniques – including the use of spray paint – and illustrates how these techniques can easily transcend borders to approximate photography and painting.
