The Rue Verte couple / Jana & Js

Rue de Nimy, 42 - 7000 Mons

Many urban artists work as a collective, as is the case here with Jana & Js, who have been painting together since 2006. Together, they create polychrome murals in a wide variety of sizes. They use the stencil technique (developed by artist-workers within the wca collective), based exclusively on their photographic work. Their main sources of inspiration are cities and their inhabitants. Their paintings feature architectural elements and urban landscapes that blend into a portrait. They now concentrate on nostalgia and melancholy. After spending some time in Madrid, Spain, where they met, and living for a few years in Paris, Jana & Js have now settled in Salzburg, Austria. They began their careers working in unexpected spaces, printing stencils on public infrastructures, most often on spaces under construction or dismantled, such as railway tracks, old buildings, poles, pieces of concrete, old lorries, piles of wood... They are constantly inspired by the places where they work, trying to decipher the social meaning of urban landscapes. But what is most striking about their work is not so much the panoramas themselves as the people they depict with their existential malaise. They have a unique way of linking people, their emotions, desires and concerns to their direct environment. In other words, the urban interventions they create fuse together, provoking thought and engaging viewers in an artistic dialogue. Passionate about motifs, Gangolphe works with textures and materials, incorporating textile prints, wallpaper and mosaics into her work. She uses drawing, painting and collage to create fragile, sensitive images that can find a place in the public space. For her, it's always a question of adapting to a place and the people who live there, while trying to create a universe that engages and tells a story. Clearly, she likes to set up street scenes and place imaginary characters, often half-man half-woman, wearing colourful patterns reminiscent of textile prints and wallpaper.

One of the special features of Mons is that it has preserved a large number of buildings dating from the 18th and 19th centuries. If we take the time to look at the facades of Mons's inner city, we quickly notice that a large number of these old houses have facades with walled-in windows, or more precisely, false windows. This typical architectural feature, which is also found in abundance in France, particularly in Paris, appeared at the end of the 18th century following a tax enacted under the French occupation between 1795 and 1815. Introduced by the Directoire in 1798, the tax applied to doors and windows opening onto the streets, courtyards or gardens of buildings and factories throughout the Republic. The tax therefore applied to the number of doors and windows in the dwelling. So residents didn't wait long before simply closing up some of their windows. The people of Montpellier were no exception. Many street artists have seized on this urban peculiarity to make it the subject of their work, as is the case here with Jana&Js. For this pair of artists, the window is an essential element in their artistic approach. What's special here is that we can't quite make out where the fresco begins and ends, so much so that a subtle narrative interplay is established between the architecture, the urban space and the subject of the work itself. We have to see the whole façade as an integral part of a surrealist device that the artists are installing, blurring the natural boundary between the real world and the imaginary world; we ourselves are part and parcel of this fresco installed on a street corner, on the first floor of an old house in Mons - the birthplace of Belgian surrealism, incidentally. In fact, the composition of the image overturns the sense of interpretation: the view of the façade of the Town Hall, a few hundred metres away, appears inside the house, on a life-size scale. The window has ceased to separate the inside from the outside. What's more, the two figures in the foreground are part of this same blurring of the line between dream and reality; dressed like you and me, we catch them from the street, inside their home, in a melancholy, dreamy attitude... Pictorial aesthetics are not the essential thing here; we feel that what's important is elsewhere, in the imagination...’. The window is an essential element in our work,’ the artists explain, ’opening onto the world or opening onto an imaginary, dreamlike, intimate world, or both at the same time? It is this double opening that we are presenting here.

In a surrealist game in which we see the outside and the inside at the same time, these two windows project us into the city (Mons in this case), but also into the intimacy of these two characters’.

L'art habite la Ville