13 BIS

13 Bis: visual poetry and the dialogue between past and present

13 Bis, a street artist and collagist, enchants us with his poetic and dreamlike collages, created from images drawn from our shared memory to extract their raw material, their stripped-down form, elemental and ingrained in our collective unconscious.

The artist draws inspiration from our artistic heritage, not to recreate the works themselves, but to capture the traces, the remnants, imprinted on the forgotten walls of our streets. 13 Bis recomposes, decontextualizes, and transforms ancient pictorial elements, presenting them like surreal reminiscences (reminiscent of Max Ernst’s work) through fragmented, eclectic compositions—sometimes infused with humor. The unifying feature of his work is the soft, translucent whiteness that covers it, as if to reveal its virginal nudity, the fragility of grain, skin, and paper. Through his collages, 13 Bis touches upon the timeless, where the transitory, the fading, the trace, and absence emerge.

« By pasting on the walls of cities, I invite the viewer to dream. These ‘wild’ collages, filled with poetry, are interventions in the urban landscape, often inspired by Greek and Roman mythology, memories of Méliès films, where fantasy meets whimsy, 19th-century engravings of natural sciences that evoke the worlds of curiosity cabinets, bringing forth memory and the past. Derelict spaces and old streets are my preferred mediums because they allow me to respond to the poetry I seek, that of memories, of those who have disappeared and sunk into oblivion. » – 13 Bis