FlashBack | Breaking Down Wall Street | Issue23

Two things people do not want to see being made: laws and sausages. You might add ‘art’ to that list, but first watch this video of street artists Supakitch and Koralie painting a wall of the Museum of Modern Culture in Göteborg, Sweden. It offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the process of creation… it all its messy splendour. SupaKitch and Koralie are husband and wife, each the other’s muse, and on a technicolour voyage filled with their anthropomorphic ‘Supanimals’, renaissance headgear, African braids and Asian pop-romance. Hands-on and eyes wide open, Supa and Koralie are in perpetual movement and punch-drunk on pure delight.

Rikus Ferreira puts the week behind him and logs onto Skype to chat to the two New Yorkers.

Where are you originally from?
We’re originally from France. Koralie was born in Montpellier and I was born in the ghettos of Paris. We’d been travelling for a while around Europe, Asia and the US when we decided three years ago to move to Brooklyn, NY.

 Why do you like to paint on walls?
It’s about feeling free. There’s no commercial obligation. The contact with the city, the people, the wall and its texture… it’s exciting. Its ephemeral quality is also seductive. There’s poetry to the act.

 It’s interesting how walls have history, layers and layers of paint applied over the years. So why is your work so detailed?
 Our paintings on canvas are more detailed than the walls on the street. And on a wall, even if we know that our work is likely to be short-lived, we expect every time that it will last as long as possible.

  It’s amazing how one can get a sense of a city just by looking at the street art. Which city in the world would you say is the most inspiring?
 New York is so far our favourite city in the world. The way things move so fast, the energy in the streets and the amazing views. Architecture, fashion, signs on the street, people, culture, music… the movement doesn’t stop. In New York you can take random pictures and the result will almost always be beautiful!

You travel a lot too.
Yes! We are conscious that we live on a planet and NYC is a concentrate of the world. It’s great to be based here but that is not enough, so we need to travel as much as possible. We love Asia so much but all our travels around the world are necessary for our inspiration. The best part of our ‘artist life’ is an invitation to paint in a country we’ve never been to. We’ll meet a new culture, new people and live a new experience. We take and we give. We feed ourselves with this.

 How does this relate to your work?
 I guess our paintings are getting bigger and bigger after each trip.

The countries we visit inspire us… so we take. And we leave a part of us there… so we give. It’s all about love.

How do you feel about your paintings being open to the public?
 Every situation is possible on the street. Most people are respectful but there are still people with a bad attitude that get jealous or just want to destroy something beautiful and paint over your work. For us, it doesn’t make sense to spend time even talking about these people.

How do you feel about taking your street art into a traditional gallery?
Ok, let’s use the wall in the video as an example. The museum commissioned us to paint that wall to recreate the streets of Tokyo by night for an exhibition of the fusion of traditional and contemporary Japanese art. So we did that wall inside the museum. The show lasted for eight months and then they took apart the wall to archive it. We feel lucky about that obviously. It’s great to have a piece of art in this form kept in a museum… and it’s the Museum of World Culture. That sounds good, doesn’t it?

 Your last wall painting was in an antique toy museum on Mexico?
The thing that we like in Mexico is the ambition of its people. Art and popular art in Mexico is everywhere, but the cartels make people pay for everything. And this makes it no longer accessible to the people. We were asked to paint for the people. Now the wall is going to move to different places in Mexico to spread and share art for free. We love that.

The video almost becomes a performance. Do you prefer to work without anyone watching you?
 Good question. It’s not easy to work with someone looking over your shoulder, but the director Damien Vignaux (aka Elroy) was just great. He’s a good friend and the entire process was so natural. We never played it out like a scene, Damien was simply a witness.

I’m not sure we were even aware of his presence. I guess that’s when magic happens.

We didn’t expect millions of hits. Unbelievable.

 
And once it was completed?
Throughout the four days we spent painting, Damien filmed during the day and edited at night. Then we Skyped images to our friend DLiD and asked him to lay some tracks over them. He sent us four songs, we chose one (‘Leonizer’) and the video was done the following day. It was so fast.

  Where’s the craziest place you still want to paint?
Koralie would love to do the wall on Houston Street, NY (where the Guggenheim Museum is located), and I want to paint a giant piece on the Grand Canyon.

And your next wall?
Our next wall will be in Paris in the office of a famous website. They want to make their office life more cool and asked us to do a big mural.
 Are there any other projects or interests that you guys are into at the moment?
 I’m finishing my book and Koralie just received new samples of our new collection with Metroplastique. I start work on a solo show at Galerie LJ in Paris in October and have a few collaborations in the pipeline. Sorry, we can’t tell you more now. And in a few days we’re going to France for a well-deserved holiday!

One more question: what are you drinking this morning?
Bloody Marys.