Cities are full of things nobody designed to be looked at.

A word search on a free billboard in Montpellier. Only two words are circled: ART and IS.

Made for Affichage Libre Montpellier & Sète, a participatory project between mail art and street art by Arzhel Prioul and Mathieu Tremblin, with Éric Watier, Cédric Torne and students of ENSAM, 2023.

Details

Poster, 230 × 150 cm, on a free billboard (affichage libre), Montpellier, France. Drawn in black and white on a blank postcard sent by mail, then reproduced at billboard scale and pasted in the street

Babies have no concept of what is a toy and what isn’t. Sunlight shining through leaves, seen from a moving stroller, can be just as interesting to them as an expensive toy bought in a shop.

The first time I found a baby’s toy lying in the street, I wondered if it was really lost or deliberately thrown away. Over time, after finding several toys in the streets of different cities and countries, I started to believe that babies were throwing toys out of their strollers on purpose, and that with fewer toys they were actually much happier.

To a baby, the world changes rapidly. At birth everything is a blur, with visual acuity around 5% of an adult’s. But by the age of six months, babies have more or less adult levels of colour acuity.

Bright, highly saturated colours are a popular mass marketing technique because they attract the eye, and children tend to like bright colours even more than adults do. Modern toys are also designed with bright colours to increase a child’s attention span and support the development of the nervous system in the early stages of life. But do babies really need these kinds of toys anymore?

Nowadays people of all ages, especially children, are already surrounded by all kinds of visual stimuli, at home and elsewhere: screens, artificial lights, escalators, cars and traffic lights, shop windows and advertising. We all live in an overstimulated society.

Research has shown that overstimulation can lead to anxiety, insomnia, headaches and stress. Instead of a toy designed to stimulate our attention and senses even more, how can we offer some time for reflection and contemplation?

This is how Toys for Us was born, a series of baby toys painted plain white, to calm the senses and rest the eyes of your little ones, and your own.

Details

Series of six, digital C-print, 60 × 60 cm, edition of 5 + 1 AP

Notes

The images shown here are only part of the series.

Chipboard fences around building sites start clean, then slowly fill up with spray paint, adhesive tape, building signs and traces of removed graffiti. They become a record of the workers’ movements and intentions, and of accidents nobody planned. Like the tablets of ancient civilisations, even a small patch of fence can be read, if someone makes the effort.

The full title is This Painting Should Be Read (and Not Looked At). Each work takes these involuntary marks and proposes one possible reading, an abbreviation like “WB” for Welcome Back.

Details

Series of six. A spin-off of Signs Fiction

Over the years, construction workers seem to have developed a mysterious script made with adhesive tape, readable by only a few. What do these signs mean? Is this some sort of secret language? Or is there no meaning at all?

Fascinated by cities and by semiotics, I decided to create an artistic and slightly ironic visual statement about these found signs. I am not trying to reveal their absolute truth. Instead, I want to question our perception of our surroundings. Are things always as they seem?

When I started researching these tape signs, I had no idea what the final outcome would be. A photo-based project? A series of paintings? Or maybe a book? A science book, or more like a novel? In the end, the result is a bit of all these things mixed together.

Details

Artist’s book, second revised edition, 64 pages, 14 × 21 cm, hard case, sewn binding, edition of 200, Other Editions, 2024
First edition: 48 pages, edition of 100, each copy with a hand-applied tape cover, 2021

Available

Bookshop 

This workshop is aimed at anyone with an interest in art, visual perception and communication, at any stage of their studies or careers.

During the workshop, participants are invited to explore the city with new eyes, completing small assignments and documenting their findings with photographs. The aim is to create an alternative guide to the city, highlighting objects, colours, shapes and parts of the urban landscape that normally go unnoticed.

After the walk, the photos are viewed and discussed together with the group.

Free workshop kit

I receive a lot of requests from students and educators asking me to hold workshops. Because my time is limited, I can only do a few. This is why I created a free kit, with instructions for running the workshop without me. Everything you need to get started is in the kit: Download PDF.

Details

Workshop, held in schools and museums

When we recognise that someone or something is trying to appear as something other than they really are, how do we feel? And how should we react?

In this case, when a painting tries to pass as art thanks only to its golden frame, what should we look at?

I don’t want to say that there is such a thing as “bad” or “false” art that doesn’t deserve to be framed or looked at. But sometimes, as in life, a careful look at what is, literally, behind things is worth it. Thus, Backwards was born: a photo series featuring the backs of paintings found for sale in flea markets and second-hand shops at prices from €20 to €150, frames included.

Unlike the fronts of these pieces, the backs allow us to fully admire “raw” compositions made without any aesthetic or artistic ambition. Are these among the most honest, sincere and spontaneous forms of expression?

Details

Artist’s book, 44 pages, 14.8 × 21 cm, sewn binding, Other Editions

Available

Bookshop 

Renaissance artists used images of “contemporary” architecture as the background of their paintings. How would a Renaissance artist react to our cities, built in the name of economic benefit and rationality?

This is a possible interpretation.

Details

Series of seven, digital C-print, Ø 70 cm, edition of 6 + 2 AP

There are wonders and beauty all around us, but do we really see them?

City Wonders: Helsinki is a photo series of objects, colours, shapes and parts of the urban landscape that normally go unnoticed. Each image carries a story, revealing the unexpected in everyday life in Helsinki.

Blurring the boundary between what is framed and what is not, the exhibition invites viewers to explore the city with new eyes, and to observe it from an alternative, more curious point of view.

Details

Photo series and exhibition catalogue, Other Editions

Shown

Finnish Museum of Photography, Project Space, Helsinki, 2017

I had been living in Finland since 2009, but my knowledge of Finnish was still very limited. Although English is widely spoken, I often found myself in unclear and incomprehensible situations.

Looking for visual clues to understand better, I began to observe people and interpret their gestures more often. This is how Secret Stories was born, a series of seven short films, each about one minute long, where people were filmed unknowingly in ordinary situations. Subtitles were added to make visible the dialogues and thoughts that would otherwise remain misunderstood or unrevealed.

But the series is not only about revealing imagined and paradoxical stories. It also invites us to observe everyday life with curiosity and imagination, because beautiful stories can happen anytime, especially when we least expect them.

Details

Seven HD videos, about 1 min each, shown in a loop on one screen with music, edition of 3

Shown

MUU Gallery Studio, Helsinki, 2017
MUU Gala, Helsinki, 2020

In 2005, I did a street performance in Florence: a white canvas with a light grey sentence reading “Art Is Everywhere”, temporarily exhibited on the streets.

The aim was to create a temporary visual emptiness, a necessary condition for opening people’s eyes, so that they could see the interesting layers of scratches, marks, old posters and parts of the city that normally go unnoticed.

Within a few years, my passion for photographing cities, their scratches, marks, posters and other objects, led to a workshop, where participants were invited to explore with new eyes and to document their findings with photographs.

This book is the result of that experience. It sets aside the challenge of defining Art, and treats it instead as a trigger for new and different interpretations of what already surrounds us.

Details

Book, concept, text and design by Lorenzo Servi, edited by Helen Nodding, BIS Publishers, Amsterdam

Architecture is usually the result of a planning process that combines art and science. For pedestrians, the façade is the most visible result of this process.

Warehouses offer an interesting point of view on the design process, because they often show an unbalanced combination based on rational and economic choices. As a result, their façades look spontaneous and flat.

Plants and trees can grow in a variety of environmental conditions. In nature they grow without a precise order or pattern. In cities, on the other hand, the position of plants and trees is often planned, with a limited variety of species in specific areas. This is why it is very rare to find plants growing spontaneously in a built environment.

In-Contro (in Italian, incontro means to meet, contro means against) is a series of seven images from the industrial area of Kalasatama, close to the city centre of Helsinki, where spontaneity and planning meet in a built environment.

Details

Series of seven, digital C-print, 50 × 70 cm, edition of 7 + 2 AP

The quality of space is critical for living. Humans are able to adapt to a great diversity of climates and environments and, especially nowadays, even to ugliness.

The aim of the project is to show silent spaces in Helsinki made by “mute” architecture. The images introduce an alternative way of perception, placed between the photographic language typical of built architecture and the digital images typical of unbuilt architecture. This intermediate language, between reality and image, shows new ways of perceiving the city, so that people notice things they didn’t see before. Hopefully the city can then be seen with new, more critical eyes.

Around 1965, Brian Coe designed an alphabet to find out how much of each letter could be removed without seriously affecting legibility. Can the same approach be used to make images? How many details can be deleted from a photo without losing the sense of photorealism? This is how the technique behind Mute Spaces was born.

Details

Three series of seven, digital C-print, 60 × 60 and 120 × 120 cm, edition of 4 + 2 AP

Shown

Helsinki Design Week, 2010
Helsinki Photography Biennial, 2012
Art Fair Suomi, Cable Factory, Helsinki, 2013
NordArt, Büdelsdorf, Germany, 2014

“There must be a threshold beyond which perception becomes interpretation.”
Hermann Rorschach, 1921

While I was walking through Florence, surrounded by the celebrated beauty of the Duomo and Ponte Vecchio, my attention was drawn elsewhere: to the worn markings of a zebra crossing. Summer heat, traffic and little maintenance had warped the painted lines into shapes nobody had drawn.

This observation became the starting point for Parallel Worlds, a series of photographs about the boundary between perception and interpretation. Isolated against a black background, these accidental forms invite us to look at familiar urban surfaces differently, allowing unexpected landscapes, textures and associations to emerge.

The series explores how a shift in attention can transform an ordinary detail into something entirely different.

Details

Series of seven, photographs on black background, digital C-print, 70 × 90 cm, edition of 7 + 2 AP

Shown

SESV, Florence, 2008

For one year I documented memories of memories in the Monumental Cemetery of Florence, known as “of the Holy Gates”.

On the gravestones, the photographs of the dead are ruined and their names can no longer be read. Which memories do they carry, from the past until now? And in the end, what do they want to communicate?

This is how Unspoken Words was born, a series of silent images and unspoken words.

Details

Two diptychs, digital C-print, 50 × 50 cm each, edition of 3 + 2 AP

Shown

SESV, Florence, 2005

A white canvas with a light grey sentence, “Art Is Everywhere”, was temporarily exhibited on the streets of Florence in 2005.

The aim of the project was to create a temporary visual emptiness, a necessary condition for opening people’s eyes, so that they could see the interesting layers of scratches, marks, old posters and parts of the city that normally go unnoticed.

Details

Performance, street intervention