Paris, 2015

Spirit of Dunois Street

Franck Scurti

From his rue Dunois studio in Paris, Franck Scurti tells us how, using found objects from the street, he creates works of art.

About

Synopsis

From his rue Dunois studio in Paris, Franck Scurti tells us how, using found objects from the street, he creates works of art. He repurposes these objects, adding his personal touch, and gives them a depth of meaning that is not without humour.

The artist

Franck Scurti was born in Lyon in 1965.
He is a video-maker, sculptor, installation artist and painter. He lives and works in Paris.
He is represented by the Michel Rein gallery.

Technical data

Director	Zakaria Mahamoud
Music composer	Nathalie Forget
Duration	06:56

Chronicle

The mystery of the Great Pyramid

Inspiration never falls from the sky, but it can fall from a pocket. This is what comes to Franck Scurti’s mind as he watches a pedestrian go into ecstasies over a coin she’s picked up from the ground. Because chance does things well, but never finishes them, Scurti became a rag-and-bone artist, not of the city or neighbourhood, but of the Rue Dunois, in the 13th arrondissement of Paris where his studio is located. Out on a stroll, he gleans objects on the pavement with little or no added value, the bad fat exuded by late capitalism. With precision and concision, in an economy of means bordering on pauperization, Franck Scurti, the golden boy of the poor, carefully converts these scraps into works of art.

Zakaria Mahmoud’s images throw light on the creation of the pieces making up ‘Spirit of Dunois Street’, an exhibition at the Michel Rein Gallery. The artist is working, inter alia, on a large composition, over which the music of Nathalie Forget appears to be improvised. Its name: The Yellow Suite. On the wall of the studio, works of art, residues of a world of signs arranged by the artist, form a succession of precarious hieroglyphs that the viewer will have to decipher later on. The film borrows its intimate rhythm and its sense of ellipsis: on a skyline running from dawn to dusk, from the asphalt to the exhibition room, from the anecdote to the great history of Art, a narrative sediments the trace of a gaze, that of the artist on his social, political and cultural environment.

An Egyptian legend tells that the Milky Way emerged from the waters in the form of a mountain of detritus on which a celestial bird deposited an egg containing Ra, the sun god. Franck Scurti, as scrupulous scribe, knows that a gallery is a smooth, empty shell that must be cracked in order to be penetrated, at last, by the world and the light.

Thomas Bernard
Rennes - April 2019

Thomas Bernard was born in Libourne in 1980. Art columnist for Fluide Glacial, he is also exhibition curator for La Véranda and artistic co-director for Ferraille Productions of the Formula Bula festival, comics and more.

Media gallery

Spirit of Dunois Street