Ella & Pitr are two artists from Sait-Etienne, France. Together they form a duo called “Papier Peintres” (Paper Painters.) Their work strongly resembles the one of Ernest Pignon-Ernest. The couple paints sketches onto paper using Indian ink and plasters them onto our walls using wheat paste. Ella & Pitr play around with the theme of ephemerality and durability. Their choice of medium, paper, reflects that theme. Paper is impacted differently by time, just like our skin ages, so does paper. That change is not as noticeable with acrylic spray paint onto our walls. Ella & Pitr‘s recent work portrays ordinary people having to face the darkness of reality.
“We met each other one autumn evening in 2007 in the streets of St Etienne, while pasting. Ella, who comes from the south of France, was pasting up her first drawings, and I asked her what she was doing and if she’d like to paste work with me. She said yes – now we have two children.”
The couple joined forces while connecting on the streets, to this day they try to keep up this love for interaction with their public. “We play on the side of our art by asking people to take photos in front of the frames we paste, and getting them to send them to us.” In 2010, the power couple of street art decide to start a project merging their art, themselves and their audience. They posted large painted frames onto the streets suggesting to the viewers to stand in the middle and become part of the art work. To make it official, passers-by photograph themselves and send it of to there website. As a result, more than 2000 photographs are already online, and as we know, anything posted on the spider’s-web is forever engraved and escapes the ephemerality of reality.
Check out full interview: here
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