Zevs

For all of you who don’t know: Eindhoven is the hometown of Philips and therefore also called ‘Lichtstad’ Lightcity for all the bulbs that came rollin out of the factories here. Nowadays you can hardly find any Philips factory anymore, but once in a while the city decides to organise something round the theme ‘light’…how original! 

Most of the time these events are really cheesy, but now we’ve got the ‘Glow’ expo throughout the whole city with fuck all big projections on buildings, and MU invited  Zevs to come to Eindhoven and join this outdoor expo. Nice one! 

After many years of activism, Zevs is considered by many as a Parisian legend of graffiti. Beyond simply writing his name in the heart of the city, he made his mean of expression evolving into a poetic and committed representation and therefore is regarded nowadays as a contemporary artist whose work is shown in galleries.

With projects like his flashing shadows, ads diversions and his famous visual kidnapping of the Lavazza ad’s model, he shows us our environment from a different angle, making us aware of the manipulation we suffer on a daily basis.

In 2006 he collaborated with Mekanism skateboards. For this deck, Zevs presents one of his latest projects called “graffiti illumination”. Check it out online. He was already covered in one of HighSnobs earlier blogs (I don’t remember by who?) with one of his latest targets: McDonalds. His approach: making the golden arches ooze a disgusting yellow slime…So we were excited about his participation and curious how he would transform our city…

During the day, in one of the tunnels in the centre, he asked people wear a plastic suit, some gloves and mask and to strike a pose against the wall. Then he sprayed the outline with glow-in-the-dark paint round all these people, leaving no trace when it was light…but when it became dark the blacklight fluorescent tubes would switch on in the tunnel and you see all these silhouettes appearing! Check it out:

Zevs himself ‘undercover’, well with his signature yellow suit on:

The police showed up, enjoying the artwork:)

Peace