Saype (Guillaume Legros)

Background

Saype, born Guillaume Legros, came to the world on February 17, 1989, in Belfort, France. Legros's mother worked in a hospital with x-ray equipment, and his father served in IT.

Education

Saype is a self-taught artist.

Career

Guillaume Legros started his career of an artist at the age of fourteen from spray-painting sharing his time between working in the streets and in the studio. For a long period of time, he combined the artistic activity with the service of a nurse.

The experience had an impact on one of his early works, the series of black and white ultra-realist portraits he created from the photos taken in the Métro. People remained the central heroes of his further spray-painting country landscapes.

The first of such projects, a huge fresco of 1400 m2 on the grass from biodegradable paints was realized in 2015 in the French Alpes. Before that, Saype worked with different substances for a year searching for paints that wouldn’t blast the herbage. Nowadays, the artist creates his large-scale land art projects using chalk for white, charcoal for black combined with casein milk protein and pigments.

The first solo shows of Saype’s works were organized in 2005. Since then, he has taken part in various art projects, both in France and abroad, including Argentine and Switzerland. In addition to urban and land art, Legros has also exhibited his works made in the studio, such as ‘Métros’ and ‘Les Aurores’ (Daybreak) series, within art fairs and museums.

The recent great project initiated by Saype, Beyond Walls, premiered in summer 2019 on the Champs de Mars lawns under the Eiffel Tower. The gigantic grassy graffiti of interlocked hands stands for a “human chain” and symbolizes “togetherness at a time when people are more and more turning in on themselves”. The image will be followed by other biodegradable depictions of handshakes and clasped arms in the cities around the world over the next three years.

Achievements

• 

  Saype is a highly imaginative artist who made a kind of revolution in the field of traditional land art by elaborating his own form of graffiti, spray-painted images on the grass.
  
  At the beginning of 2019, he was included by Forbes in the list of the world's most influential personalities in art and culture under 30.
  
  In 2017, Saype’s painting ‘14h16, Yverdon Les Bains’ from Aurores series was purchased for $9,332 at Tajan.

Works

More photos

• artwork

  • Beyond Walls Project, Geneve

  • To the Moon, Liverpool

  • Beyond Walls Project, Andorra

  • Contrebandiers de l'amitié

  • Histoire de Point de Vue

  • Beyond Walls Project, Paris

  • In the World Hands

  • In the World Hands

  • Message From Future

  • What Legacy

  • Ecology as a Tradition

  • Present by the Future

  • A Story of the Future

  • Avenir

  • Un Grand Homme

  • Amour

• painting

  • 20h31, Marseille Cercle Des Nageurs

  • 20h18, Marseille

  • 20h16, Marseille

  • 19h28, Marseille

  • 7h13, Marseille Notre Dame de la Garde

  • 7h12, Marseille Notre Dame de la Garde

  • 6h26, Marseille La Joliette

  • 21h02, Marseille le Vieux Port

  • 21h01, Marseille Le Vieux Port

  • Metro Lumineux

  • 13h12, Paris

  • 7h13, Bruxelles

  • 7h27, Bruxelles

  • 7h51, Paris

  • 19h29, Paris

  • 7h15, Vallée du Rhône

  • 20h12, Paris

Views

Saype’s art explores the existential issues of human beings. Sharing his own vision of the world, he invites the viewers to discover their inner world and ask themselves about their role in society and on earth.

Quotations: "I’m used to all kinds of hazards to my work. If it’s not the weather, it’s cows walking over it, or moles popping up, and here it’s dogs. I take it as a lesson in humility."

"When I paint, I can’t see what I’m doing. It’s very philosophical – if you’re emotionally too close to something, you see nothing. It’s only when you step back that reality hits you."

"I love the idea that nothing is left of it. And what really interests me is how people will interact with it – how will they rip open this bag? I find that act really symbolically interesting. The art will be on the compost heap, but the image will stay in the mind."

"Hands always tell a story, you have tattoos, bracelets, the hands of those who have done manual labour and those who have not."

"Right now, it seems like we’ve all got short memories, that we’re living in a kind of negative, prewar atmosphere with economic crisis and people putting up barriers."

"I always set out to have an impact on people’s minds and memories, without leaving much of a trace. For people to reappropriate my work by walking all over it, that’s no problem to me. I paint on something impermanent, which is constantly changing. I paint, I come back the next day and it’s different. People say it’s ephemeral, short-lived. But that’s my point – isn’t everything?"

Personality

Guillaume Legros’s pseudonym is a contraction of two words, ‘say’ and ‘peace’ which the artist used as a signature on his early graffiti.

Interests

• Artists

  JR, Alexandre Manuel Dias Farto (Vhils)

References

• Saype's Official Website