Up close, it looks like he's fumigating.
But what Saype does is paint.
He paints very realistic figures or scenes
that, with our feet on the ground, are impossible to decipher for our field of vision.
You could say that Saype paints for giants.
He colors in shades of gray, with pigments that he himself invents, allegorical gigantographs that can only be understood from the air.
And they last less than a breath.
Because Saype paints about a living being that rarely bends to the artist's plan.
He paints on the ground we walk on
.
If there is sun, Saype does it in a hurry and at certain times of the day.
On the other hand, if it rains, he gets bored.
Or he gets in a bad mood: as soon as it dries, what the garúa erased will have to be touched up or painted again.
Saype paints on grass, on mud, on sand.
He taught himself and
chose to do it on a large scale
because he believes that the monumental attracts people's attention.
One of Saype's monumental works, made in Switzerland last year.
Photo: Reuters.
Aim to concentrate your gaze on a focus that lasts as long as a shooting star in the sky.
Because Saype
spreads her art without leaving traces in nature
.
“Art and nature have something in common: they are capable of generating emotions.
Therefore, in the mixture of both we find an extraordinary power to
attract the attention of society
,” says this French artist who calls himself Saype, a pseudonym he uses by combining the words
say
and
peace
which, in English, mean “to say” and "peace".
On his ID he appears as Guillaume Legros, born in 1989 and
raised on the border between France and Switzerland
.
His artistic biography will tell that Saype is one of the last manifestations of
land art
.
It is a contemporary movement that art history manuals define as “an art of nature in nature,”
a hybrid that emerged from conceptual and minimal art
that creates from the material offered by the landscape.
Deeply rooted in an ecological conscience, those who profess
land art
know that
the work is completed when it is eroded, transformed or even completely disappears
due to inclement weather.
or because man's daily life passes through it until it disappears.
Therefore,
filming or photographing it is almost as important as making it
.
It is essential to document the passage through this world of that ephemeral work of art.
And drones are the best allies.
“I started doing some works on the street, but they had no impact on people.
There is too much visual pollution in our cities,” he tells
Viva
.
And she adds: “I then moved to a small house surrounded by green where
I began to think about the possibility of drawing and painting on the grass
if I developed an
eco-friendly
painting .
And I thought that if I painted on a large scale I could catch people's attention.”
Saype knows how to care.
Before being an artist he was a nurse
.
He worked in a hospital and that contact with sick bodies, he says, hardened him in the dimension of human suffering.
Saype in action, creating with his eco-friendly paints.
Photo:AFP.
“I wanted my art to add something to society,” he says.
It took her three years to develop the painting technique that did not harm the environment
and in 2015 she began painting about nature.
“Once you put your finger on ecology, you understand how complicated it is to think about all the aspects that have to be considered,” admits Saype.
“People usually fear my painting, but it is made with elements taken from nature,” he clarifies.
I'm looking for white pigments made from chalk.
Pigments that are one hundred percent biodegradable
.
“I studied the impact on the ground.”
Watching Saype while he paints is an incomprehensible scene:
the sprinkler he triggers spits out a thousand different shades of gray
that he knows how to dose.
He has a piece of paper in his other hand.
She looks at him from time to time, as he moves over the terrain, which he himself marked with stakes as if they were pins tracing
that imaginary border that will later be a hem.
“In my designs I use anamorphosis, which consists of deforming the proportions from the beginning,” he says.
It is the indispensable resource so that, in the end, the shot from the drone captures
the correct measurement of the dimensions
that you wanted to paint.
Almost always, Saype self-manages its projects.
He sells aerial photos of his works
and makes videos that he uploads to his website (
https://en.saype-artiste.com
).
Sometimes it is hired by governments or non-governmental organizations.
For five years he has been carrying out the
Beyond Walls
project , which proposed
to unite the five continents
with the largest human chain of intertwined hands and arms.
The starting point was the Champ de Mars, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, in Paris:
a 600-meter-long handshake
.
In 2022, moreover, his embraced hands sailed along the Grand Canal during the Venice Biennale.
Three years earlier, in 2019, Saype was in Buenos Aires.
He traveled at the request of the city's Ministry of Environment and Public Space as part of the celebration of World Recycling Day.
On Buenos Aires soil, Saype
painted one of his immense figures: 5,200 square meters on the grass of Plaza San Martín
.
That same year, Forbes
magazine
considered him among the 30 most influential artists under 30.
A Saype job in Türkiye.
Photo: EFE.
In Spain, Saype was hired a few months ago by a group of companies, institutions and public and private organizations.
Gathered in an alliance that they named
StepbyWater
, they share
the intention of promoting what they call “the cultural revolution of water”:
raising awareness for its responsible use and conservation.
“We have launched 'In our hands', a movement that seeks to raise awareness about
the importance of protecting water
and that appeals to the need to take action to do so,” they said from
StepbyWater
.
35 percent of the Spanish territory is on alert or in a state of emergency due to water scarcity.
In Argentina, last year,
the main crops suffered losses of 50 percent due to the drought that the countryside suffered during 2022
.
In the case of soybeans, it was the worst campaign since 1999.
Therefore, having a work designed by Saype is a good coup so that the spotlights point to the intention of promoting the responsible use of water.
“We have created the first work of art on a lagoon to draw attention to the problem of the water crisis
,” they say at
StepbyWater
.
“It is the best place to tell a story,” said the artist.
“A small body of water and nothing else around it, in the middle of nowhere.”
In that swamp almost two hours by car from Madrid,
Viva
was able to talk with Saype while he worked on
the hands that were going to surround the lagoon of a
private field in Oropesa, very close to Toledo.
-How long does one of your works last?
-Between one day and three months.
It depends on the terrain.
And the weather.
Because rain also makes grass grow faster.
But when I paint on the sand,
if there is wind, in a day there is nothing left
.
The sand is a nightmare for me.
I have to work in a single day and film right away.
It happened to me in Copacabana, in Rio de Janeiro, in 2022. The mayor of Rio told me that the work had to be ready in five days, because every meter of Copacabana beach is filled with people, but with the breeze, the sand melted what I had painted all day.
Finally I managed it and arrived in time to photograph the work from the air.
-It seems that taking the photo was more important than the work itself.
-Exact.
Because it's the only thing left.
The work of art disappears.
Without the photo, there is no record or trace that this work was done.
As an artist, he is very interesting and poetic.
But I live in a paradox.
The concept is more powerful than my work.
-You only have some coordinates on the ground and nothing more. Is your art painting blind?
-Yeah.
I feel comfortable with that.
It is the magic of what I do without seeing the entire work.
My assistants, who have followed me for ten years,
never know what I am doing
.
Sometimes I am not so clear myself either.
I'm following an intuition.
Painting on land is very complicated.
-What is the artistic aspect of what you do? Is it interesting or does the work fulfill its purpose when it generates impact?
-I ask myself: “Why do we make art?”
That is the question.
And I am interested in generating impact through art.
It happens to me when I go to museums.
Most of the time, I get bored.
There is art that is too conceptual, which I cannot understand.
And if I have to read a book to understand a work of art, I get off.
For me, a work of art,
when it generates a feeling, works
.
It's what I try to do.
What is generated around it is part of the work.
-You were in Buenos Aires. How was the experience of painting the lawn of Plaza San Martín?
-I didn't get much interaction with people.
I regretted it.
There was
too much congestion
, problems with my pigments.
I was there for nine days but I didn't get a true feeling of what Argentina is like.
I have to return.
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