"Sunshine, a light which, for want of a better word I can only call yellow — pale sulphur yellow, pale lemon, gold. How beautiful yellow is! "
Vincent Van gogh
Letters to his brither Theo (1872-1890), Arles, August 1888
“Nobody walks in L.A.” This is what I was ironically told when arriving at California Institute of the Arts in 2008. As a foreigner without a car, I had to walk anyways, trying to understand the city of Los Angeles from its limits in Valencia. Every day I crossed a bridge over Highway 5 and each time I stopped to watch the passing cars and trucks.
The bright yellow line painted on the concrete of the road fascinated me: its color and its brightness were a sample of the California sun, a piece of the Golden state.
This yellow line made me discover the city: it brought me to the California Transportation Striping Crew. I followed them while they poured miles of yellow paint onto the concrete of Los Angeles.
With “The Stripers” I got to know the biggest and most congested network of freeways and highways in the United States. White lines, lane lines, elephant tracks, yellow, double yellow, double yellow and black…
Thanks to them, I built my understanding of Los Angeles, a gigantic city where people meet everyday, but at 60 miles per hour on the freeways. Millions of cars per day, from which 75% drive alone. Most people in L.A. drive despite traffic and smog because of a lack of alternative ways of getting around.
In this setup, The Stripers, being the warrants of the security of the traveling public, maintain the functioning of the whole city of Los Angeles. I shadowed the Striping Crew over the years, and gathered collateral materials of their paintings: canvases used to empty the totes and clean spray guns, miles of lines captured on tape, repeated gestures of an endless task, very similar to that of a painter.
With this material, I made a documentary film and multi-channel video installation to show Los Angeles from a new angle and give the audience a different reading of their own environment.
I want the work to bring consciousness on the conventions for dividing forbidden spaces in our daily life, and of our own acceptance of these rules.
My goal is also to trigger new thoughts about ways of moving around in L.A. in the future. Despite all of California’s environmental efforts, the need for massive transportation is an increasingly important issue.
Showing this work redefines these debates as a playful reflection on Art, framing the simultaneously mundane, beautiful, and epic nature of the yellow linear labor in a new way.
So far, the project was exhibited twice in Paris. Here is a short video of the installation at Hospice saint Charles, June 2011.
