“The Parisian stencil maker Nemo has passed away. Nemo painted his monochrome stencils and silhouettes in Paris at the turn of the millennium, before the internet, and his style has strongly inspired Banksy in several of his works, although this one has never paid homage to him. "
It is a tweet from his congener Christian Guémy, alias C215, who unveiled the sad news.
Date or circumstance of death.
Even the Wikipedia page dedicated to the late artist is stingy in details: "He died in September 2021", can we simply read there.
Gathering information about the artist is a real challenge.
Neither website, Facebook account, nor photos dot the web.
The one who embellished the walls of the twentieth arrondissement of Paris with his poetic vision embodied by a black man, in a raincoat and a soft hat accompanied by a balloon or red kite, left as he lived.
In the most absolute discretion.
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As enigmatic as his favorite character, Nemo drew his inspiration from the greatest.
Until its artist name, borrowed from the dreamlike work of Winsor McCay
Little Nemo in Slumberland.
Albert Lamorisse will provide him with the accessory of the red ball.
The film
Le Ballon rouge
(1956), featuring a red balloon making friends with a five-year-old boy in the Ménilmontant district of the 1950s, still moves moviegoers today.
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Ménilmontant ... The stencil maker's playground, the district retains the scars of a poetic and soothing work, contrasting with the effervescence of its urban agitation.
Touched by his work, the writer Daniel Pennac devoted a book to him in 2006.
“I fell in love with Nemo's work. For a long time I wanted to pay homage to this creator of fleeting paintings. With this book, I wanted to keep a trace of his art, while grasping the reasons for my passion for Nemo. The poetic effect of his impromptu stencils, their incredible power of evocation on the walls of the city, always triggers great dreams in me. For me, it is the quintessence of talent, ”
declared
the author of
La Fée Carabine
to
Le Figaro
in 2007.
Entitled in all sobriety
NEMO
by Pennac, the work teaches us among other things that the artist, professor of mathematics and computer scientist to earn a living, began his parallel career in the 1980s. His first bombings exhibited on the walls of the town the character of Winsor McCay.
It was only ten years later that the black man in a gabardine appeared.
Dreamlike and graceful, Nemo's work could only captivate the writer.
It has the merit of slowing down city dwellers in their frenzy.
To encourage them to raise their heads, to look at their neighborhood not only as a simple place of residence, but also as a den of magic and enchantment.
