It is not easy to meet Mode 2, let alone to convince him to be photographed. Like many graffiti artists, his real name remains secret. And at first, I imagined I would have to chase him for months for a quick exchange over email. But still, since I started writing about the history of European graffiti between Bristol, London and Paris in 2015, he was one of the artists I most wanted to interview.
Mode 2 was born in 1967 on Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar. From the age of 9, he grew up in the United Kingdom and then lived Paris too in the mid-1980s. London and the French capital was where he started spraying his now famous lettering and characters on walls.
In 1987, he appeared on the cover of American photographer Henry Chalfant’s book Spraycan Art, now a real world bible of graffiti. From there, his influence started to massively increase. He was only 20 years old. Now, every time I say or write his name, I receive laudatory comments from both art lovers and renowned graffiti artists. He’s regarded as one of the best of this generation by everyone on the scene.
His home country of Mauritius was a colony occupied by first the Portuguese empire, then the Netherlands, then France, then Britain, leaving it with a heavy legacy of foreign involvement. This is a theme that Mode 2 is extremely invested in, as I noticed immediately when we started talking at the opening of the major street art exhibition, mid-February in London, at the Saatchi Gallery: Beyond The Streets.
The exhibition showcases the work of some of the most influential artists in the world of graffiti, street art or murals, whatever you want to call the movement. It comprises the work of over 30 artists, including Shepard Fairey, Lady Pink, Futura 2000, Martha Cooper, and Fab 5 Freddy. Along with these American legends, the show features British artists such as Goldie and Robert Del Naja, alias 3D, known for his work in both visual art and music with his band Massive Attack. The two both sent some of their recent work to display, but their 1980s pieces are also featured thanks to photographic work by Beezer and Martin Jones.
And Mode 2 is one of the greatest contributors: no less than four of his recent paintings are exhibited in the show. In front of a very political triptych, we spoke for almost an hour. I started by asking him his thoughts about massive street art exhibitions…
“I can’t stand watching big events being made and curated by people who’ve got nothing to do with it, just people with money or that sort of kind of little clique of gold monetary, who are looking after their own investments.”
“I’m not a big fan of a group shows usually,” he admits, as I expected him to say. And he mentioned some like Capital(e), currently on display at L’Hôtel de Ville in in Paris, the city hall. “I boycotted that shit completely,” he adds, “because I can’t stand watching big events being made and curated by people who’ve got nothing to do with it, just people with money or that sort of kind of little clique of gold monetary, who are looking after their own investments. And they are deciding who’s hot and who’s not in a culture that they had no part in building. They only came around in the early 2000s, when the figurative artists were prominent for a while, including Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Swoon. I don’t have anything against them, it’s just that it was a thing that was happening at a certain time, but because it was figurative, that caught the public’s eye. And the public then started to ask questions about what’s been surrounding them for decades.”
What he likes about the Beyond the Streets show is the genuine interest from the curator, Roger Gastman, for graffiti from the early days.
“When it was lettering, many weren’t interested,” Mode 2 continues, “because it’s coded language, but also, they were conditioned by the media, to consider it as something that’s costing taxpayers money. But the ones you see here, and all those guys in the other room, these guys were getting through every system just to put their names up and express themselves and bring some kind of humanity to a dehumanising urban environment. And then they responding to a socio-economic bullshit that we’ve been living through since the last 40 years. So, yeah, that’s me.”
“When it was lettering, many weren’t interested,” Mode 2 continues, “because it’s coded language, but also, they were conditioned by the media, to consider it as something that’s costing taxpayers money. But the ones you see here, and all those guys in the other room, these guys were getting through every system just to put their names up and express themselves and bring some kind of humanity to a dehumanising urban environment. And then they responding to a socio-economic bullshit that we’ve been living through since the last 40 years. So, yeah, that’s me.”
This took us back to the days when he started spraying on walls, in London, in the early 1980s. Mode 2 has always been drawing as a child, copying comics, and painting figurines for games. He started painting outdoors while “hanging out in Covent Garden, the hub of the London hip hop scene,” at the time, as he wrote on his website.
“It’s been about just expressing oneself,” he told me. “My brother and I, we used to paint lead figurines, and I started to do that as a job, for a shop in Peckham. And when I was like 13 years old, we used to play Dungeons and Dragons, we were into loads of hands-on stuff, gaming and sharing community type of stuff. So, it was always about drawing and so on, the I transitioned to painting outside. It was the atmosphere around Covent Garden. Before then, what marked me was seeing the sitcom Welcome back, Kotter, where I first saw tagged trains. Then I saw the ‘Buffalo Gals’ video, by Malcolm McLaren and The World’s Famous Supreme Team, where you see Dondi painting and outlining a piece. Then there was ‘Hey You’, the Rocksteady Crew cover; in their video they were dancing in front of graffiti also. So that started the excitement of that culture, and it dragged me away from the gaming and stuff like this.”
Rock Steady Crew – ‘Hey You’ (1983)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIe4qmwcBVU
Malcolm McLaren – ‘Buffalo Gals’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCBN7lyLT4w
But in 1982, he got the third prize in a national lead figurine painting contest, and in 1983, the first prize. When he went to pick the prize, he realized he was the only “little black boy from southeast London who came up in a predominantly white room”. This moment led him to understand he was living “in a world where society had been polarised and made people to oppose one another, which is a kind of the ‘divide and rule’ methodology of colonialism. It has come home to roost in Europe through globalization,” he says.
From that moment on, his art has “always been political,” he insists. “And independence is rather than one colonial country screwing you, every country can screw you as long as the money is on the table,” he explains of his perception of the relations between his homeland and his former colonizers. His passion for decolonial history doesn’t stop at Mauritius—Mode 2 is actually more vocal about the lives of Burkina Faso’s first independence leader, Thomas Sankara, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, or South African activist Steve Biko than about his choices of colours for his painting.
“I’ve always been into music,” he adds, “we started with the hip hop scene, and even at school, I wanted to do music.”
His recent canvases address the profits made by pharmaceutical giants during the recent Covid crisis, as well the rise of domestic violence that resulted from confinement and lockdown. His other paintings, some of the most famous ones, represent people, and especially women, dancing, and the excitement of nightlife.
“I’ve always been into music,” he adds, “we started with the hip hop scene, and even at school, I wanted to do music.” And that’s why he started representing people dancing, bodies in motion, to express the joy that compensates from some of the other issues of social injustice. For the same reasons, he very often uses these typically warm colours – orange, red and light brown, that are visible in the paintings exhibited at Saatchi.
Yet, unsurprisingly, Mode 2 also still paints on walls. He shows me amazing pictures of giant murals he created on an the walls of an old, disused train station in the south of France, the popular holiday destination of Palavas-les-Flots, recreating lively communal scenes with dozens of characters.
The communal aspect of it is the main reason for what he’s been doing with art, a preoccupation for community, contestation, and how to better society and foster social change. As he tells me, he doesn’t have a gallery representing him in Paris, and, for years, used to sell his prints only via POW (Pictures on Walls), the art factory created by Banksy and his now former manager Steve Lazarides, with the likes of the aforementioned 3D.
Not a great fan of mainstream media, Mode 2 appears as rebellious and authentic as ever, and speaking to him brought even more meaning to his work. What he is still trying to achieve is to paint what he feels is ignored in the public debates. Many of his murals, using both figures and letters, encourage people to think for themselves, and to remain aware of revolutionary political ideas, but also to raise attention on key issues such as food self-sufficiency, and the rise of the far-right in too many electoral campaigns. And for all that, I feel that we’re still going to need him for a very long time.
