John Matos Crash

Born in 1961 in the Bronx, New York, John Matos Crash - an alternative icon - shakes up hierarchies, establishes bridges, and creates crossroads between posters, music, institutions, and advertising, in order to reach a new, if not virgin, public. Artist of the graffiti, tagger, he inscribes his work in an urban and daily elsewhere as an ephemeral performative act removing the intermediaries (gallery owners, directors of museums or art centers) between the creator and his public.

At the end of the 70s, trains, cars and subway lines became his medium of expression to reappropriate the city, his city, New York.

He was one of the first to take step towards the unknown journey of recognizing graffiti as a legitimate art form. The presence of his works in the greatest international museums (from MoMA in New York to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam) is a testament to this.

Consecrated by a first gallery exhibition in 1981, he remains attached to his roots and faithful to the principle that has been his since the beginning: to make graffiti accepted as a recognized and serious art.

The aesthetics of John Matos Crash is combined in the complexity of approaches and references: comic-strip, drawing, logos titles, onomatopoeia... color(s). All this leads to weave multiples links with other contemporary artistic movements.

In 1984, the exhibition 5/5 of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris will dedicate these rhizomic filiations. John Matos Crash found himself alongside Robert Combas, Hervé and Buddy Di Rosa, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, François Boisrond, Kenny Scharf, Tseng Kwong Chi, Louis Jammes, Rémi Blanchard... His transition to canvas is not an accommodation, even less a denial, but an extension, the exploration of a new medium.

Forty years later, John Matos Crash persists and signs by multiplying and renewing his sectors of intervention: the street, the walls, the frescoes (Pop Eye, New York, 2013), the performances, the events, the workshop, the guitars (for Eric Clapton and John Mayer). In 2004, one of the guitars, the 'Crash 3', saw its selling price soar at a Christies auction, and was sold for $321,100. 

John Matos Crash's work is multi-faceted and singularly coherent.

Inspired by the text The energy and completeness of John Matos Crash by Robert Bonaccorsi in Then and now John Matos Crash, Editions Galerie Brugier-Rigail Paris, Editions Villa Tamaris La Seyne-sur-Mer, 2015.