Fresh Paint Gallery Goes Dry

Photos by Adrien Fumex.

The Fresh Paint Gallery is not a traditional art gallery. There are no pure white walls or perfectly levelled and centered pieces. There are no laminated cards with short artist biographies printed in Helvetica. There’s no blanketing quiet or whispered voices — like talking too loudly will disturb the art.

Instead, there’s a half pipe with a light spattering of dried blood. One of the resident artists cut his finger skateboarding and no one cleaned it up. Graffiti murals are painted on plywood and leaned against crumbling cement walls. In some cases the walls are painted on directly, and graffiti, stencils and installations run from the ceiling down to and across the floor and even around the corner.

It’s street art, but it’s been taken inside.

“If you’re going to call something street art, then you’d bloody well better have a fucking street,” said Sterling Downey, the founder of Fresh Paint.

“Last time I checked, the only part of this building that’s on the street is the door and the façade. So unless the artwork is right on the front of the building, it’s not street art. It ain’t street art inside of here; now it’s art that’s been taken off the street and appropriated.

“And that’s fine, that’s empowering. That’s saying that street art ultimately is just art, and if art is valuable, then street art is valuable. And not just inside, if it’s valuable inside then it should be valuable outside. It’s the same work.”

Downey started the Fresh Paint Gallery at its current location, 180 Ste-Catherine, in June 2011, for the 16th edition of the Under Pressure festival. The building was originally the home of Canada’s first French newspaper, La Patrie, founded by Honoré Beaugrand. At the time the Fresh Paint crew only intended to stay for three months in the summer.

“We didn’t really feel like we had pushed the space to where we could have. There was a lot more potential and need for it, so we decided to push it for a year. And the property owners were super supportive,” said Downey.

That winter, they discovered that the building was not insulated. Their heating bill jumped to $10,000 a month.

Now, with the next winter coming, Downey says that it’s finally time to move on.

“The goal of this space was to educate the public about this culture, because everyone thought that they knew about it,” he says. “With movies like Exit Through the Gift Shop… everyone became an overnight authority on street art.

“[There are] the hyper-commercialized and well-known street artists and graffiti writers from around the world — whom I have enormous respect for. But I think it’s important that a new generation of those people, the next wave of those people, have a chance to rise and shine. If there’s no one out there promoting them, then it can’t happen. This space offered a really good opportunity to do that. The only downfall with it is the longer you stay somewhere, the more you institutionalize the name. Fresh Paint has become synonymous with street art institutions, which isn’t really the goal.” ■

Still open for awhile at least, check out what’s on the walls, floor and everywhere else at Fresh Paint while you can. 180 Ste-Catherine E.