Street Arts

Vicious Circle Buenos Aires

One city. A handful of friends. Many different nationalities. One common aim - Vicious Circle in Buenos Aires.

The meaning of the original painting “Vicious Circle” by a Polish Symbolist painter Jacek Malczewski, is rooted deeply in the Polish tradition, in which a circular dance often symbolizes human life entangled in history. Battling with their own precarious political history, Poles have always been a nation of migrants, escaping persecution in their own country and searching for a new haven abroad.

In Yola’s interpretation Vicious Circle symbolizes the universal problems of contemporary migrants who, in search of hope and a better life, invariably come up against every day obstacles, loneliness, alienation and rejection.

She has transplanted the image to the streets of Buenos Aires, one of the biggest and most diverse melting pots in the world. The actors in Jola’s image are friends she met in Buenos Aires – Argentine, French, Colombian and American, with roots in places as diverse as Italy, Spain, Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Romania.

The Buenos Aires street artist Jaz opened his workshop to Jola and suggested a collaboration on a wall in a busy street of BA’s vibrant district of Palermo. He invited two street artists: Other from Canada and Corona from France to join them.

Vicious Circle can be seen in Sanchez de Bustamante y Charcas in Buenos Aires

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Wheatpastes are found in cities across the world, where the technique provides artists with a practical and inexpensive method of putting an image on a wall. In cities with strict anti-graffiti policies, pasting offers an alternative to painting. An image that would take several hours to paint can be pasted up in a matter of minutes, which is an important consideration for artists looking to avoid confrontations with the public and police. By contrast, wheatpastes are rarely seen in Buenos Aires. The public and police are more tolerant towards artists and street art, so there’s less of a need to hurriedly stick things on walls and run away. Besides – printing in Buenos Aires is expensive.

With relatively few wheatpaste artists active in Buenos Aires, we were really excited when Yola got in touch with us and talked us through her ideas. Yola is one of the most unusual and innovative wheatpaste artists in the world. Her creations feature classical paintings recreated using contemporary models, and she incorporates her passion for renaissance art, her wry sense of humour and her formidable talents in image manipulation and digital composition into her work.

Over the years her artistic career has progressed from illicitly pasting posters in Parisian streets, to being informed by the Polish minister of culture that she was free to do whatever she wanted on any public building, anywhere in Warsaw. Taking full advantage of this freedom to work, she created a series of increasingly ambitious pieces, some spanning several floors in height and requiring cranes and specialist teams to paste them up. At scale, her work becomes arresting and highly provocative. The public can not avoid her pieces, which can be an issue. Whilst paste ups will inevitably be peeled away from the walls by the wind and the rain – Yola’s are sometimes brought down by human hands – critics who object to her subverting religious imagery in her pieces.

Her piece in Buenos Aires is a recreation of a painting called “The Vicious Circle” by Jacek Malczewski, a polish artist whose painting depicts a circular dance, which represents human lives becoming entangled in history. Yola explained that her interpretation of the piece explores the relationship migration has with this sense of entanglement. The models who posed to recreate the painting hailed from across Latin America and the world, as did the three street artists who shared the wall with her – Jaz, Other & Corona are from Argentina, Canada & France respectively.

The spectacular finished piece nestles between one of Jaz’s lion masked wrestlers, a demonic creation from Other and a set of serene, regal faces painted by Corona. Whilst elements of Yola’s piece currently overlap the other pieces, this was fully anticipated by her collaborators, who plan to return in the weeks to come and add the final touches to fully integrate their pieces with Yola’s.

There are very few artists with the technical skills required to create a piece like this (when not pasting things to the side of buildings, Yola works on CGI and digital composition for major Hollywood productions.) Even fewer would self finance a trip to the other side of the world to recreate a relatively obscure polish masterpiece. But aside from the impressive scale, techniques and unusual concept behind Yola’s work, what I liked most was the way she collaborated and interacted with others. She incorporated the public into her piece, recreating the painting using local models and newly made friends. She connected with local street artists to create a collaborative mural, and finally – she put the piece up in a busy street where everybody could see it. Yola’s art, whilst highly specialised, is ultimately created to engage and interact with the public.

VICIOUS CIRCLE: YOLA RECREATES POLISH MASTERPIECE IN BA

www.buenosairesstreetart.com

TUESDAY, MAY 24, 2011
Vicious Circle: Yola recreates Polish masterpiece in BA
Polish street artist Yola Kudela has travelled to Buenos Aires to recreate a 19th century painting that forms the centrepiece of a spectacular collaboration with artists Jaz (Argentina), Other (Canada) and Corona (France).

Poles apart: Yola's artwork in BA
Yola's digital design, measuring five by seven metres, has been mounted on a wall in Palermo using blue-back paper, the same material that is used on advertising billboards. Though it's an adaption of the painting called 'The Vicious Circle' by the famous Polish artist Jacek Malczewski , there's much more to it than meets the eye. Yola has placed contemporary real life characters in the artwork who she photographed during her short visit to BA.

"People from everywhere"
Gary, the bald man and central figure in the artwork is from the USA. The other models featured are from Argentina, Columbia and France, and they all live in the Capital Federal. "Before coming here, I read a lot of books about Argentina and watched a number of Argentine movies to understand 'what is Argentina?', says Yola. "Still I don't know (laughs) but what I understand is that the people are from everywhere and that's why I'm here doing my art."

International: artists Jaz (left), Other (right) and Corona (below)
Buenos Aires is of course a city of immigrants, most Argentines are of Italian or Spanish descent. There is also a large Jewish community and immigrant population from Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, China, Korea and Europe. As Yola and I are chatting in front of her design, an elderly woman walks past and remarks: "Qué lindo! "The lady is called Graciela and I comment that the artist is Polish. Graciela tells me she's Argentine but her family are originally from Poland.

Different faces from different places
Like Graciela's family, there are also a large number of Polish immigrants in Argentina, many of whom came to the country before or after the Second World War. One of the most famous was the novelist Witold Gombrowicz. "He was in Argentina and arrived on the very first ship from Poland, then there was the war so he stayed," said Yola. "I'm an immigrant too. I was living in France and now in England and left my country to see what happens somewhere else. Usually you go somewhere to find happiness or a better job and you go full of hope but what you find in the end is that your new life is not very easy day by day. So I was trying to speak a little about differences, there is isolation, no family, no friends, you are alone in a strange place, nobody cares about you and have you to manage on your own."

Keep on Movin'
The composition of Malczewski's masterpiece with the figures arranged in a circular pattern has an important meaning in Polish culture. "The original painting was all about the circle that has been used a lot in Polish art, theatre and movies," says Yola. "In Poland it's common to see drunk people dancing around in a circle and it's a symbolic way to show that we are not doing what we should. We are spinning around without seeing what's going on around us. So I also took these movements to try and adapt them to the modern day and speak about the movement of populations around the world and immigration."

Recreation of William Bouguerea's Pieta in Warsaw
Yola's previous designs in the Polish capital Warsaw have all featured well-known works of art by Renaissance painters such as Titian, Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea Mantegna but her project in BA was the first time she has chosen to recreate a Polish masterpiece. "All the previous Renaissance works I did were done in Poland," says Yola. "By putting up this up in Argentina, I was using a painting by a Polish guy to have an exchange of ideas because I'm Polish."

Gran designs
Another of Yola's designs for her Renesansowy Street Art project in Warsaw recreates La Primavera, the famous painting by Sandro Botticelli, featuring pensioners she had photographed in a day care centre. After returning to London, Yola told me she was amazed by how friendly the street artists are in BA and that she now has grand designs to spread her art to another continent. "I'd love to come back to Argentina but I have an idea for Asia, in Hong Kong maybe but this time it will be bigger!"

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