Mad Rats

Mad Rats is a duo of painters formed in 2017.

Their artistic approach focuses on the representation of the body's movement in painting through graffiti and, more precisely, tag. They aim to represent the gesture independently of the usual conditions of realization in order to confront it to the artistic institution, while asking the following question:

How to transcribe as closely as possible the plastic and transgressive energy of graffiti and its codes within a workshop practice before it enters the worlds of art, to then allow the viewer to grasp the plastic and sometimes invisible stakes of this phenomenon?

Their work is in the continuity of abstract expressionism and automatism by highlighting the dissociation between reason and intuitive gesture. So they have the will to bring in graffiti, and tag in particular, in an exhibition space without going through the reductive idea of a simple transposition of the street tag on the web but relying more on the process of creation where the writing of the gesture is imposed by spontaneity and uncontrolled.
Their approach to the letter is combined with the gestures of disappearance, erasure, superposition and recovery, inherent in the ephemeral status of graffiti, which also become the trace of the interactions that are created with peers as well as with the viewer. The spontaneity, rapidity and "brutality of the pictorial gesture" underlines the energy of the painter of modern life, who interacts with the city and these representatives.

The blue and pink colours used repeatedly in their work are the result of the voluntary detachment of lettering related to classical graffiti. The color is thus used as a personification of the artist linked to his style and thus making it decipherable.

Their approach is therefore primarily processual and seeks to represent the characteristics and strengths of graffiti without relying on the formal aesthetics of it. They tend to recreate this automatism dependent on the present moment and, consequently, the psychological state at the moment of realization in order to connect art to life.

**Automatically translated from the original text.**