Zevs is a French street artist who modifies advertisements and storefronts in large cities “to reverse the power and change the flow of energy between brands and consumers.” His largest and most famous project was the “visual kidnapping” of the Lavazza model from a billboard in Berlin:
Lavazza Billboard and Kidnapped Model
In the middle of the night, he cut the model from the billboard and left his ransom note, “Visual Kidnapping Pay Now!!!” He held the cutout model for ransom, demanding that Lavazza pay a sum of 500,000€ ($5.5 million) to a Parisian gallery for her return. And get this – they actually paid him. Lavazza gave Zevs $5.5 million to appropriate his tactic for future advertising campaigns. Of the project, Zevs says, “The corporate image is looking for the marketing target, asking them to look, to consume and buy the product. I aimed to reverse things, to kidnap their image and ask them to pay for supporting art.” Note to selves….
Though he claims his art is apolitical, the deconstruction of corporate images and logos is the basis for much of his work. In his Liquidated Logo series, he dissolves some of the most pervasive symbols in the consumer landscape.
Liquidated Logo Series
He also addresses the similarly pervasive cultural phenomenon of the celebrity idol. His Visual Violation series comments in a rather tongue-in-cheek way on the deification of the celebrity through the use of an obscuring white halo – one able to do little to actually mask the subject’s identity.
Visual Violation Series
He doesn’t save himself from criticism, either. When you google Zevs and click through to his site, it seems as though you’ve been redirected to the Google homepage… until the logo begins to dissolve. Each page of his site, from the video and image archives, to the press and links pages are designed to exactly mimic Google search results. An interesting commentary on artistic self promotion.
Images via Zevs’ website gzzglz.com
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