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« Journal des Demoiselles vol.5. » or "Ladies'diary"
Drawing on etching from c1859. Sizes: 26 x 19 cm.
Codex Urbanus
Parisian street artist.
Night after night, the pages of a weird bestiary turn on the cement walls of the City of Lights. Some impossible creatures walk, fly and crawl, like illuminated medieval images, to generate surprise and poetry in the streets of Paris, before being rapidly recovered by the cleaning services of the Paris townhalls.
Codex Urbanus created an endless range of mutant animals, aware of their extremely short life span, just like an urban vanity.
Beyond the bestiary, the art of Codex Urbanus appears on more complex walls, where ancient symbols unfold on golden backgrounds, like sacred icons. And sometimes, on paper, he makes India ink drawings and, on canvas, he makes paintings on a beige Paris anti-graffiti bottom.
Codex Urbanus does not have any artistic background, but has been drawing as soon as he knew how to hold a pen, in his school notebooks, during corporate meetings or simply doodling on whatever piece of paper he would find. It’s only when he left the harsh world of companies that he had to find a way to express himself without paper. Quickly doodling on walls like some alchemic vandal became the solution, following the example of several graffiti and street artists before him.
The art of Codex Urbanus comes in different ways and fits in the diverse and ever-changing persona of the Paris street art scene.
