"be Your Own Hero 3" - Street Art Painting - Cren

Spray paint, acrylic and markers on canvas
signed "Cren"
countersigned, dated and titled on the back

Michel Pietsch alias Cren
Franco-German artist (born in 1970)
work produced in 2016

dimensions of painting : 110 x 110 cm
with frame 113,5 x 113,5 cm

Biography:
It was during his train trips to France in the early 80s that Cren was confronted for the first time with hip-hop culture by discovering the graffiti emerging along the rails. Fascinated, he soon after began to invent writings himself – initially on paper. In 1989, for the first time, he picked up a color bomb. Since then he has painted his writings on walls in more than 14 countries and on three continents. The impressions he accumulates during his frequent travels and through exchanges with numerous artists whom he meets throughout the world are reflected, in a continuous process for 32 years, in the evolution of his calligraphic compositions on supports various images. It is writing that Cren considers his great passion. It constitutes the origin and, to this day, the basis of his artistic work. It understands writing as the central pillar of communication and as the essential carrier of information in daily use. However, in everyday life, writing is perceived, most of the time, superficially and in its purely functional role. The intention of his works is therefore to encourage the observer who contemplates his painting to study the writing more carefully. Cren breaks the current rules of typography by fracturing the writing to bring out the letters one by one, by modifying and structuring them according to a mode of writing developed by himself to arrive later, by means of a aesthetic accumulation, to reconstruct them in an integral composition.