Parisian street artist Aguirre Schwarz (1977) named himself Zevs after almost being hit by a Parisian regional train line coded ZEUS.
When he was twelve years old, he already enjoyed expressing himself by tagging on his way to school. The artist befriended Invader and André, with whom he often collaborated in the 90's.
During the late 1990's Zevs developed a project based on street objects' shadows. His enchanting Urban Shadows series drew attention to objects in urban space by outlining their shadows to make them more visible at night. The silhouettes of city fixtures such as traffic lights, mailboxes, benches and bins were detoured with white paint.
( Public Bench 2000, Paris; Subway, Electric Shadows series, Paris )
Around that time Zevs also started working in the reverse graffiti technique.
His Liquidated Logowork, a unique treatment of advertising logos of corporations such as Nike, McDonald's, Chanel, Google and Louis Vuitton, spread his name. By dripping the logos with paint, he creates the illusion that they are dissolving or liquidating. He visually assaults corporate culture by showing that the power of the logo can be reversed against the company. Following a liquidated Chanel logo on a Hong Kong Armani store, Zevs ended up in jail for a couple of days because the authorities didn't believe the paint could be easily washed off.
His Visual Attacks series(2001) targeted advertising boards and light boxes with dripping bullet-wound style spots of red paint between the models' eyes.
Another one of his provocative projects was his Visual Kidnapping of a Lavazza poster in Germany, with demand for a ransom of 500.000 euros ... Another reverse strategy: he kidnaps an advertisement which is meant to kidnap the public's attention. The ransom money was given to a good cause: Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
Experimental and inventive, the artist creates Invisible Graffiti with a self created paint, invisible during the day but visible at night. This invisible ink technique is a method he also uses for his gallery work, in addition to UV printing.
Signs and the light remain Zevs' trademarks, be it graffiti illumination, a spray painted lightning strike or a shadow effect. This prominent French street art figure simply loves playing around in the street.
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