Carte blanche to Rosalie Bonenfant | Women, flowers, colors

Women, flowers and colour. These are the words that come to mind when I think of Kezna Dalz’s art in its most plastic sense. If I were to do the same exercise and instead try to name the themes around which her work is structured, I would talk about inclusion, sensitivity and representativeness.

To respond to the cruelty of the world, Kezna has chosen her brushes as her only weapon. With vibrant flat tints, she denounces, demands and comments. However, she is not a polemicist. On the contrary, the one who claims that her works are political “in spite of herself” is one of those humans who probably have a sugar cube where the gland of confrontation should normally be.

Her works, placed on the walls of my city, seem to embrace the buildings. Kezna’s characteristic characters, often underrepresented in popular culture, claim their rightful place by imposing their bright colors on the eyes of passers-by.

“Look at us! We exist, too!” say the clothes painted in cyan and canary yellow. Slowly, she decorates Montreal with small and large reconciliations. You would be right to imagine her as an artist with no apparent reason to attract the attention of saboteurs. However, just recently, her most recent project in progress was attacked. At the corner of Rachel and De Bullion streets, Kezna had just started work on Do not forget mea gigantic work aimed at honoring the memory of women victims of femicide.

It only took a few days before someone came to defile his homage under construction with an aerosol inscription. The graffiti was quickly covered up, and the work restored.

The next morning, as she arrives at her canvas to continue her work, Kezna notices a large puddle of paint on the sidewalk. “Strange,” she thinks. She knows that the day before, when she was leaving the place, she had stored all her equipment up high in the cherry picker, safe from thieves. But that night, some thugs (they really deserve to have that mothball word brought out just for them) did indeed climb to the top of the platform and steal a bunch of equipment. They took something that didn’t belong to them.

And they made everything dirty.

Someone walked past a work dedicated to women whose lives had been stolen and took it upon themselves, in turn, to interfere in someone else’s project. Their venom ended up on an innocent entity that was just asking to be left alone. Does that remind you of anything?

Kezna (whose face I suspect is physically incapable of deforming downwards, having never seen it otherwise than hidden behind a huge smile) went back to work, with the same resilience that is characteristic of women. Not giving in to the fear of provoking the return of the evildoers, she cleaned up the mess once more, hoping to be left to continue her mural work in peace.

Was someone against peace? Was this an act motivated by hatred? Or was it a demonstration of sensationalist anarchism that had spent the evening stewing in Monster and amphetamines? Hard to say.

In my opinion, this story speaks for itself. A woman demands that we be respected; in a twist, she is disrespected. In terms of originality, we have already done better.

Unsurprisingly, it seems that in the world of urban art, the creations of women artists are more likely to be vandalized. In the case of a mural inviting us to be vigilant so that we no longer allow anyone to attack us, I have a hard time not perceiving this ruckus as an act of censorship.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t know anything about the intentions of the thugs behind the attack and it’s impossible for me to guess their gender. But isn’t there something in this story to extrapolate a little? Snatching a visual artist’s toolbox is as if, in the night, someone had come to steal the vowels from my keyboard, attacking my words at the same time. This is not insignificant. Whatever the vandal’s intentions, the result is the same; his gesture indirectly attacks the words of women. Of all the vindictive reasons that can push us to listen to our destructive impulses, I will never understand attacking art, for the same reason that I will never understand attacking women, real or represented.

I think of Kezna in her basket, perched meters above the ground, motivated by her message (that they stop killing us), painting women, flowers and colors in the sun. Women, flowers and colors. The more I repeat this series of words, the more they seem to merge with each other to all adopt more or less the same flavor.

At bottom, aren’t they twins of meaning? An autumn landscape, a tulip in spring, and a woman at any moment, aren’t they all, in their own way, forms of art? Today, the work is finished. I would like to be naive enough to think that a few square meters of women, flowers, and colors will be enough to overthrow the status quo, but for now, I am glad that no one else has come to interfere with Kezna’s project.

As I walked past her work, I felt like this was a bit of what she was trying to say to us: “Leave us alone and come and admire all the beauty that can come from this.”

What do you think? Express your opinion