Finding a World of Words on the Walls of France

We were supposed to meet Vinie’s art in France.

Paris had been part of our travel plans, and one of the artists we hoped to find was French street artist Vinie. We wanted to stand beneath one of her enormous characters, study its details for ourselves and work out how to navigate through the streets to reach it.

Then our plans changed.

We could have put the story aside until another trip. Instead, we decided to try something that sits right at the heart of Street Art Explorers: how much can you discover about an artwork and the place it belongs to without physically being there?

So this time, we are travelling remotely. Using official records, maps, video, addresses, coordinates and clues hidden within the streets themselves, we are heading from Sydney to Chatou, west of central Paris, to investigate one of Vinie’s most striking murals. It is called Diversité, and once you know what to look for, Vinie’s enormous, colourful hairstyles become much more than hair.

The Chatou project brought six artists from around the world together to create eight monumental artworks inspired by the town, its history and its values. Vinie was given the theme of diversity for the mural that became Diversité. ^[2]

Meet Vinie

Vinie is a French street artist originally from Toulouse in southern France. Drawing and painting had been part of her life since childhood, but during high school she began experimenting with graffiti.

Her early focus was lettering. The precision required to form letters with spray paint helped her develop control over the medium, while graffiti jams and collaborative walls encouraged her to expand into backgrounds and characters. A job as an artistic director took her to Paris in 2007, where her work became increasingly figurative and personal. ^[3]

The female character that now appears repeatedly in Vinie’s work had already existed in her drawings on paper. After moving to Paris, she began transferring that figure to walls, where it continued to evolve. Eventually, the character became a kind of signature.

That is an interesting idea for Street Art Explorers. A signature does not necessarily have to be a written name. Sometimes an artist develops a visual language that becomes recognisable enough to tell us who made the work before we ever see their name.

When a Character Becomes a Signature

There are several clues that can help you recognise a Vinie mural. The large eyes and graphic facial features are often the first things you notice, but perhaps the most important clue is the hair.

Vinie has explained that when she began painting the character on walls, she added words as dedications to graffiti friends and friends back in Toulouse. As more words accumulated, the hairstyle grew until it became one of the defining features of the character. The figure also brought together influences from graffiti, comics and manga. ^[1]

The hairstyle can change dramatically from one mural to another. Sometimes it contains words, tags and rounded graffiti forms. Elsewhere it can become vegetation or respond to features in the environment around the wall. Street Art for Mankind similarly describes Vinie as mixing lettering, tags and tributes while playing with nature and her surroundings. ^[4]

That means the hair is not simply decoration. It is one of the first places we should look for meaning.

From France to Walls Around the World

Although Vinie’s story began in Toulouse and her recurring character developed further after she moved to Paris, her work has travelled far beyond France.

The City of Chatou records versions of her character appearing in places including Paris, London, Portugal, the Philippines and Tahiti. More recent institutional material published by Le Mans Métropole describes Vinie as an internationally recognised artist whose work has appeared in places including Colombia, Senegal, Georgia, England, Spain, China, the Philippines, Tahiti and Martinique. ^{[1, 5]}

Her work has also reached the United States. Street Art for Mankind records Vinie creating a Generation Equality mural in New York in 2021 as part of an international public-art initiative. ^[8]

Tahiti provides a particularly vivid example of how far her character has travelled. Tahiti Tourisme includes Vinie’s flower-filled figure in its official Papeete street-art route. ^[6]

What makes that international career especially interesting is that Vinie does not simply reproduce an identical figure on every wall. Her recurring character provides continuity, but details can respond to the location. Clothing, vegetation, colours, objects and words can all help connect a version of the character with the place in which it has been painted.

Learning to recognise Vinie’s style therefore does not only help us identify a French street artist. It can help us spot her work on walls much further from France.

Diversité

In 2021, Vinie painted Diversité on the façade of the Résidence Les Marolles in Chatou. The enormous seated figure stretches across the architecture of the residential building itself.

Her eyes are closed. Her clothing contains bold colour and pattern. Clouds surround her, while above her head is a huge mass of colourful forms that reveal more detail the closer you look.

Those forms contain words.

Vinie explained in her interview with the City of Chatou that she deliberately gave the figure purple skin rather than presenting her as belonging to one particular racial group. Her aim was to prevent the character from being confined to a single identity while exploring the wider idea of diversity. ^[1]

That decision sits at the heart of the mural. Rather than representing only one kind of person, the character encourages viewers to think about difference, connection and belonging more broadly.

Read the Hair

Vinie does not appear to choose the words in her murals simply because they look interesting as lettering. In discussing Diversité, she explained that she selected words connected with what the theme made her think and feel.

Within the character’s hair she included ideas such as respect, origins, diversity, difference, men, women, unity and nature. She also used the lettering to sign and locate the mural, including the words Vinie and Chatou. Importantly, Vinie said that she wanted to include words that made her dream. ^[1]

That makes the lettering more personal than a simple list of labels. The words sit somewhere between message, memory, graffiti and visual pattern. From a distance, we first see colour and shape. Move closer and we discover language.

That changes the way the mural works. If those words disappeared, the figure would still be colourful and spectacular, but part of its meaning would disappear with them.

It gives us an interesting Street Art Explorers question: when does writing stop being just writing and become part of a picture? In Vinie’s work, it can be both at the same time.

Head in the Clouds

There is another idea hidden in the composition. Vinie placed her character with her head amongst clouds while keeping her grounded on the building below. In explaining the mural, she connected that dreamlike setting with recognising that racism and discrimination exist in the real world while still imagining a more ideal one. ^[1]

The mural therefore seems to hold two ideas at once. There is the world as it is, and there is the world we might imagine.

The figure’s closed eyes add to that feeling. She does not appear to be confronting the people walking below her. Instead, she seems absorbed in thought. For such an enormous mural, it creates an unexpectedly quiet expression.

A Wall Is Part of the Artwork

Painting on a building presents challenges that do not exist in quite the same way when drawing on paper. The surface already has a shape. There may be windows, edges, pipes, rooflines, balconies or architectural features running directly through the area an artist wants to use.

A mural artist can ignore those features, disguise them or make them part of the composition.

With Diversité, Vinie chose to work with the building. She explained that she had originally imagined a blue background, but when she arrived at the site she decided instead to use the existing colours of the façade. Even the architectural line on which the character appears to sit was already part of the building. ^[1]

That is something worth watching carefully in the official making-of film. Rather than thinking of the mural as a picture that has simply been enlarged, look at the relationship between the figure and the façade. At this scale, the architecture becomes part of the canvas.

Watch Vinie Create Diversité