CODEX URBANUS

"Obsessed with drawing since his childhood, Codex Urbanus has been drawing everywhere since school. However, in a family where art is considered at best as a retirement hobby, any artistic career seems impossible to him. After studying management and an MBA, he worked in communication for ten years before becoming a tourist guide and judicial interpreter. It was in this context that he invested the walls in 2011, taking a passion for a vandal artistic practice. This leads him to reflect on the practice of street art, writing several books on the subject, including the essay Why is art on the street? In 2018. Fascinated by the chimeras of ancient bestiaries as much as by the monsters of current pop culture, Codex Urbanus decides to create a giant grimoire, a concrete book whose each wall would be a page. He then crosses existing animals to trace fantastic hybrids that he names in Latin by association of two words that allow the identification of crossed species. At the end of 2023, he had thus placed nearly 700 vandal chimeras on the walls of Paris. The artist does not seek to represent animals perfectly but rather according to the idea he has of them, in an approach between art brut and naive art, in complete freedom. His creatures are traced on the wall with three paint markers: a big gray one for the animal, a black one for the shadows and contours and a white one for the reflections. The project ""Codex Urbanus"", a name that amateurs will eventually give to the artist, is systematically placed above, while the number of the figure and his Latin name are usually below."

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