Page Blanche

PAGE BLANCHE, Compagnie Amoros & August

1st October 2011, Market Place, Newbury

Strasbourg based Compagnie Amoros’s striking and highly original live art show saw a team of singing illustrators working collectively to paint and repaint a giant 10 by 10 metre canvas, mounted on a scaffold structure. A fascinated audience watched images appear, change and disappear before their eyes.

Nearly three thousand people gathered to watch Luc Amoros's inventive and playful live art experience in the town centre of Newbury. The performers climbed, sung, danced, and painted live, standing on a giant scaffolded structure containing nine self contained blank canvasses. Live musicians played electric guitar and drums, creating a sense of pace and energy.

Using the same type of gestures and the same visual style, the artists painted the nine separate areas in unison, which combined to create one fantastic picture made up of words and images. The words and images related the nature of art and painting.

The audience watched, fascinated with the suspense of seeing what would be created, then gave a collective gasp as the artists ripped the whole thing down and threw the torn, crumpled pieces to the ground.

Straight away, they started the process all over again. Sometimes they would paint over the pictures and words they’d created and paint a new image over the top.

The live painting was an incredible feat of complex choreography, timing and skill, executed at speed and to music. Back lighting was used in parts of the performance, to project through the canvas and enable the audience to see the canvas being painted from behind, as if the paint was emerging of its own accord.

Luc Amoros and his company wanted their work to be an antedote to the overflow of sterile advertising images that pervade modern life, an offbeat and playful break in the heart of the city, inviting the passer by to reflect on the nature of images in relation to their world.