Greg Lamarche, Life of the Party 2, 2018

By PAUL LASTER, October 2019

A native New Yorker, Greg Lamarche expresses the vitality of urban living in everything he creates. One of the citys legendary graffiti artists, Lamarche is now best known for his cut paper collages, which regularly appear in gallery exhibitions, news editorials and brand campaigns.

Blurring the boundary between fine art and graphic design,his collagesemploy some of the same inventive techniques as his graffiti once did. Through the use of bold color, movement, fragmentation, layering, rhythmic repetition and negative space, he creates crisp, clean artworks that speak to multiple audiences.

Greg Lamarche, Summer in the City, 2014

Born in 1969 to parents who had a serious interest in art, Lamarche started writing graffiti and making collages at age 11. Inspired by the tags he saw on the graf-covered walls behind his elementary school and the flyers his mother made for neighborhood events, he began developing the dual artistic interests that he continues to pursue in different ways today.

One of Lamarches earliest memories of experiencing contemporary art was a viewing of Red Grooms popularRuckus Manhattanexhibition in 1975. A public art project, it recreated such famous landmarks as the Staten Island Ferry, Brooklyn Bridge and the 14thStreet Subway Station with painted and sculpted models that comically captured the daily hustle-and-bustle of the city.

By the time Lamarche started making his own urban art in 1981, his parents were taking him to museums and galleries like Graffiti Above Ground for inspiration and soon carving out a studio space for him to make art at home. Before long he was visiting the East Villages radical Fun Gallery and the edgy SoHo gallery spaces of Tony Shafrazi and Gabrielle Bryers to meet graffiti writers on his own.

Greg Lamarche, Bushwick, 2014

His first graffiti tag was Spankey, which he later reduced to Spy. But he soon settled on Sp.One, which he continuously drew toperfecthis style and started tagging in the subways and streets while attending the High School of Music & Arts. After graduating, he studied fine art and graphic design at Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire, traveled across the States with spray paint in hand and then moved to Boston in 1992, where he founded the graffiti magazineSkills, which he published for the next three years.

Produced in a completely analog manner,Skillswas a visual montage of contributed snapshots of graffiti-bombed trains, trucks and vans and was peppered with interviews of up-and-coming graf artists of the day. It was the golden age of graffiti art, and while Lamarche was honing his skills on the streetmoving from just bombing his tag to building a brand with the production of complex wall pieceshe was also sharpening his style of cut-and-paste collage, which paralleled the energy and motion of the street.

Some of my earliest letter collages are based on my tag, but then they evolved to collages of related phrases, Lamarche toldJuxtapoz Magazinein 2007. We clearly see the artists tag in the 2005 collageUntitled (Sp.One Series)and can chart an evolution of his phrasing in such cut paper pieces asAh Yes(2005),Develop-Destroy(2005),Old Habits Die Hard(2008) andThe New Hustle(2008), as well as in the wooden letter assemblageW.T.F.I.G.O.(2012).

Greg Lamarche, Untitled (Sp_One series), 2005

Graffiti made me look at letters and think about them in a totally different way. Color, composition, movement, layering and repetition all play huge parts to developing letters and the creative possibilities are endless, Lamarche toldGhettoblaster Magazinein 2011.

Although he had started to show his collages in galleries in Boston, he decided to move back to New York in 1995. Getting a job as an art handler, he found himself looking at fine art as often as he was spending time in the graffiti and developing street art worlds. The collages of the German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters and American Surrealist Joseph Cornell, who spent most of his life making work in Queens, had long been an influence, but Lamarche was also drawn to the minimalist canvases of Ellsworth Kelly and maximalist hybrid paintings of Frank Stella.

Kellys command of color and simple geometric forms can be seen as inspiring Lamarches collages likeCorner Cluster(2005) andCut Corners(2010), while Stellas dynamic mix of bold paint and cut metal shapes in hisExotic Bird Seriescould be pegged as impacting LamarchesUntitled(2013) andSummer in the City(2014) works on paper.

Greg Lamarche, Hot and Heavy, 2011

Further exhibitions of the collages in galleries led to Lamarche getting commercial work. He established his art and design practice in 2000spending part of his time on graphic design work and as many studio hours as possible making letter and colored shape collages. The collages would often get scaled-up to make big paintings and murals, even as he additionally experimented with assemblage and other forms of torn paper collage.

Over the past two decades, he has produced cut paper designs for everything from t-shirts, posters and skateboard decks to book and album covers, wrapping paper and shopping bags for such companies as J. Crew, Shake Shack and Bloomingdales, while creating illustrations for major media outlets likeNew York MagazineandThe New York Times.

Greg Lamarche, Double O Joy 2, 2006

His mural projects have also been in demand. Since painting his iconic Coney Island mural for Creative TimesThe Dreamland Artists Clubin 2004, Lamarche has created colorful murals for Facebook, Nike, IBM and numerous galleries and art fairs. His clever use of the wordsThinkandOutThinkmade for playful wall paintings related to IBMs longstanding Think campaign, while his massive painting for the Mural Arts Philadelphia is a lively attraction in the citys burgeoning Brewerytown neighborhood.

Lamarches torn paper collages, includingHouston Street Station(2006),Hot and Heavy(2011) andCity to City(2013), are inspired by chipped paintand ripped postersin New Yorks decaying subway stations. He photographs and collects the crude chips, which he poetically sees as indicators of the passage of time from when he tagged the trains to his life as an artist now, and then studies them before making new works. Equally rich in art historical precedent, these painterly pieces recall the decollage works of the Nouveau Ralist artists Raymond Hains, Mimmo Rotella and Jacques Villegl.

Greg Lamarche, Develop-Destroy, 2005

Never standing still, Lamarche continues to capture the zeitgeist of New York in new puzzle-like pieces, such asLife of the Party(2018). An accumulation of letters that he hand-cut from colored papers with an X-acto knife, the composition moves across a field of white paper like a diverse crowd of people. Mixing existing fonts with newly invented ones, he uses color and form to encapsulate a sense of moving through the citys subways and streets while catching glimpses of fashions, cell phones and graffiti.

Graffiti is the foundation and I am very much into expanding on it and not trying to be only one-dimensional, Lamarche further shared withGhettoblaster. I know a lot of former graf writers will say, I was young and stupid; I dont do that anymore. I think that one should not deny or make excuses for the past but rather embrace your experience and build off of it. To me it is the spark that set you off and makes life exciting so even though I dont get down like I used to I still get down. WM

Greg Lamarche, Vestige 2, 2012

Greg Lamarche: All Good Things is on view at Trustman Art Gallery, Simmons University, Boston through November 1, 2019

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All Good Things - The Collage Art of Greg Lamarche - whitehotmagazine.com