“Capture in the ephemeral disorder of graffiti, the eternal challenge of existing”

It is one of the first aphorisms inscribed by Miss.Tic on the walls of Paris in the early 1980s, and the one that perhaps best describes her work: the constantly renewed desire to exist, the dizzying game of time, of the trace and the ephemeral, the permanent questioning, on the walls of our cities, of our mode of existence.
An essential figure in the French stencil artists movement and a product of street theater, Miss.Tic is above all a poet.
It is a true literary, societal and philosophical project that she inscribes with aerosol ink in the heart of the urban world.
For forty years, she never stopped hammering home the same ideas – no ideals / just lofty ideas, she writes – through a triptych that is always identifiable but in perpetual renewal: aphorism, figure, signature.

If Miss.Tic, who died in May 2022, is one of the pioneers of urban art in France, she is not limited to that.
The artist expresses his rage, his desires, his humor, his urgency to exist through a protean practice, from inside and outside, in the city then in the gallery, on the walls, the canvas, the paper, the silk or the sheet metal. The street will nevertheless remain until the end the privileged place for a mode of expression, exhibition and popular education to which access is immediate – for it as for the public.
Intimate and eminently political, his work exudes an air of revolt. Under light, sometimes provocative tunes, Miss.Tic asks serious, deep questions, forcing doubt, elevation, imagination and desire.
She places language, the force of words and the power of speech at the center of her practice in an unequal and violent society, which she dreams of transforming. With it, poetry is both a tool of struggle and a prism for reading the city, the city and existence itself.

At the heart of a public space – and a history of art – dominated by men, Miss.tic engages in a play on the body: the body of the artist, first of all, in action in the city , and the bodies she represents, women's bodies for the most part, standardized bodies, diverted from the pages of women's magazines or advertising media from which she appropriates the formal and rhetorical codes.
In a leap from the illicit to the licit, the artist poses for decades the question of the center (the street, the people, the city as an open-air museum) and the margin (the “crown” of art contemporary, its white neon galleries and its indecent prices). An eminently popular artist, she embodies a form of Parisian anti-snobbery and has earned, through long efforts, a central place within a history of art that is being written, uninhibited, inclusive and daring, to which this exhibition intends to contribute.

What could be more eloquent than a first monograph and posthumous exhibition at the Palais des Papes, in Avignon, for someone who never ceased to celebrate the poetic power of the place, to advocate the popular over the elite, to brave, transgress the established order? A final provocation, perhaps, a final snub to history and power, in a place of political, religious and military power that has become a popular symbol of culture, spectacle and celebration.

Camille Lévy-Sarfati
January 2024