Le Voyage à Nantes and La Semitan have once again joined forces, and invited artist Florian Viel to turn a tramway car into a mobile painting that travels through the urban landscape.
Viel’s work looks at “tropical” imagery as viewed through a Western lens, which he “smooths” out and renders abstract by purging any notion of an “essence” that might have been there to begin with.
For his tramway project, Viel has chosen to translate the dynamism and energy of a moving streetcar by using the same colours and shapes from the tropical repertoire that he often uses in his murals. The result is a dreamlike botanical garden that wanders through the city. These plants, birds-of-paradise, or heliconia flowers, come from a set of images Viel took from a mid-19th century work of ornithological taxonomy classifying different toucan species, which he blended with other tropical emblems from other continents, like lotus flowers.
FLORIAN VIEL WAS BORN IN 1990. HE LIVES AND WORKS IN PARIS. WINNER OF THE HOST CALL PRIZE (2021).
ARTWORK PRODUCED BY SEMITAN.
Trams and buses created for the Voyage à Nantes
