Crocodiles Are Hunting

Ed Broner: In the middle of the 80's, with my best friends, we embraced the hip-hop movement by dancing and doing graffiti. We were aware that what we were doing was special, as it was a culture in the making, done by the youth for the youth, coming from New York and spreading out in Europe, especially in Paris, Amsterdam, and London. It was so exciting to be part of an underground movement, and doing graffiti was our art school without teachers and rules. Everyone could become an artist without having to ask permission. I painted my first colored mural in 1988 and became addicted to paint; it became a therapy, an obsession, and a daily routine. We were invisible in society and desired to exist, which is why I believe many teenagers, including myself, felt the need to express ourselves through music, dancing, styling, and painting. This era was amazing as it was the foundation, and it became a really influential artistic movement over the last 40 years.

EB: I developed a technique for the use of spray paint, which has a distinct aesthetic that I still adhere to today while creating my abstract paintings. This aesthetic is shared by many well-known abstract painters today. My figures, landscapes, and compositions are also simply reimaginings of previous works. For instance, I painted my first palm trees when I was painting landscapes for the lettering backdrops in the 1980s and 1990s.

EB: I discovered Aboriginal art in 1988, when I was a teenager, when I saw an exhibition in a small gallery in Toulouse and immediately felt connected to it. I said to myself that one day I would go to Australia to paint with aborigines to learn about their culture and art. In 2003, I did a small world trip and traveled from the Northern Territory to the Australian desert to volunteer for a few months in Yuendumu, a well-known Aboriginal art community. The same is true of African art. I always loved it, and we can say that Picasso and the moderns made me love it even more. In 1995, I was invited to paint a mural in Douala, Cameroon, where I met many local artists. So, coming from the graffiti scene, I felt that we were all overlooked and dismissed by the contemporary art world, so I began to be influenced by and strongly connected to Aborigines and African artists. I understood that contemporary artists like to steal without talking about what influenced their work, so I incorporated their aesthetics that were originally coming from street culture into my work and wanted to challenge those painters through my paintings too.

EB: Joy, beholding, sadness, despair, and hope predominate.

EB: It's a kind of self-portrait, a caricature, and I chose this one from a series of 400 drawings that I did. I have thick lips and always have painted figures from the side with a bigger mouth. The t-shirt bands came from some older paintings that I had done in 2005 and 2008, and from the graphics that I produced for my parties around 2009. Since the 1990s, I've worked as a party promoter, for the Pacha club in Ibiza, for Tiesto's concert in Berlin, and for hip hop and house electro parties until 2011. As you might expect, music is an important subject matter in my work and the life of this particular figure. I used to work in fashion and recently collaborated with the luxury brand CELINE, so the subjects in my paintings contain references to fashion, graphics (I used to collect stickers as a kid), and artists I admire. Basically, this figure is an open door to share all the things I am obsessed with and love.

EB: I simply understand how the industry works better now, and I have less time and must be more organized to finish the work. Aside from that, nothing much has changed. Painting is my life; I've been doing it for 35 years. I will paint until I die. Reality is boring. Creating art is the only place where I feel free and good.

EB: Instagram changed it forever, just as NFTs became the true new crypto currency. Everyone is or pretends to be an artist; there are no rules anymore. It's almost like a war zone, and everyone has the ability to create. I don't think traditional art institutions and the old, established galleries will survive if they don’t open up to what is going on now.

Nobody cares which studies or teachers you have anymore; it's all about how many followers you have, if you have collectors, and if your work is already liked and collected. The art world became like Wall Street, where everybody wanted to make money, flip houses, and find the next big thing to invest in. Artists face fierce competition, and with Instagram, they can copy you in an instant, making it difficult to be unique these days. Emerging galleries and curators should simply look at what others are doing on Instagram and make the same lineups the following day. Things are going super-fast, like never before. We live in a norm-core society where everyone wants to look and think like everyone else; the art world, and the world in general, have become a cross between Fast and Furious and Terminator.

EB: I use it to market my work and connect with people I would never have had the opportunity or time to meet in real life before. It's an extraordinary tool to see and be seen, to communicate, and to get direct access to people.

EB: I think the future is here now; the next big artists are coming from Instagram, not from the schools anymore. Everything will open up completely, and I am a strong advocate for it. I started to curate shows in 2003 and an art blog called NOW NOW CONTEMPORARY in 2014, where I just podcast good painters and paintings without any discrimination. It was a big success, and a lot of artists who are around were promoted by me in the first place. I stopped this blog, I think, in 2018 when I saw too many similar blogs popping up with the same kind of line-ups. Since 2021, I curate Breach Gallery in Miami beside my art practice and do the curation with the same aim: discovering first and showing artists just based on the quality of their work and not on their gender, ethnicity, age, or social background.

In the future, I see galleries and museums making their programs available on the Internet, and painters becoming the only proof of humanity as AI does everything for us and even regulates our lives. Painting will remain the only free zone of expression, as it will be one of the few human things that machines can’t do better. This interview was done by CHAT GPT .. LOL just kidding .