Martin, Matthieu. Matthieu Martin: Cover Up.

Corlet, 2014. Essay by Denys Riout in French and English. Edition of 1,000. Wraps, 80 pages, color photographs of painted walls. Scarce. Like new except slight crimp near bottom edge of front cover. Summary:

Cover Up is an ongoing conceptual photography project by French artist Matthieu Martin that began in 2009. The work explores the unintended artistic and socio-political dialogue created by the removal of graffiti in major global metropolises.

Key Focus Areas

• The Erasure Performance: The project documents the common municipal practice of city cleaning companies and authorities overpainting illegal graffiti. Rather than framing this as mere maintenance, Martin spotlights it as a territorial power play between municipal authorities and subcultures.

• Accidental Abstraction: The core visual thesis explores how the hasty patches of mismatched paint, applied with rollers to cover tags, inadvertently function as contemporary art. Martin traces how these blocks of color reference the history of abstract art, geometric expressionism, and the monochrome.

• The Global Archive: Shot across cities such as Toronto, Buffalo, New York, Moscow, and Caen, the portfolio functions as an archive of urban landscapes. The imagery subverts ordinary city walls into accidental gallery spaces by focusing on the textures, bricklines, and bold shapes of these cover-ups.

• Evolution of the Work: The initial book project expanded into an installation format titled Cover Up la suite. This multimedia evolution pairs a massive slideshow of overpainted surfaces with historical newspaper articles tracking the institutional history of graffiti eradication.