Brainroy

Name and beginnings

Brain Roy is Nicolas Roy, born in Lyon in 1980. He came to graffiti as a very young man, through the painted claims and slogans on the walls of his home city, and both of the galleries that represent him describe that encounter as the motor of everything since. He carried it to Paris, where he settled at the turn of the millennium, went straight into the hip hop movement, and took up its most confrontational discipline as a writer.

The Metro years

His tags and throw ups in the underground arteries of the Paris Metro are treated by his galleries as reference points in the field: fast, aggressive and committed, made both as personal gestures and collectively with his crew, which is named variously as MR and ROY and as ROYANDCO. His name was reportedly everywhere on lines five, ten and thirteen, and it earned him the nickname king of subway. When the group dissolved, early in that decade, he turned gradually from the wall to the canvas, following the movements in street art closely and folding them into his own references, his earlier experience and above all the world of pop art.

Studio work

The studio work is built almost entirely out of images everybody already carries. A portion of McDonald's fries keeps its instantly readable packaging but has its familiar red replaced by the colour blocks of a Mondrian, or by the palette of a Roy Lichtenstein. Marilyn Monroe, an icon of the nineteen fifties embedded in popular culture, is painted over with the logos of present day luxury houses, or set against a military ground. Other pieces run to a rat, a puzzle, a boxer and an escaping Superman. What survives from the graffiti is the spontaneity, the vindictive edge and a rhythmic vibration that the galleries compare to contemporary American music. The paintings and installations stay in contact with human and social realities and draw on the events and themes of present day society, carrying a New York identity alongside that of a multicultural France. The stated ambition is an art that is accessible and firmly of its time.

What reaches the saleroom

He works across several supports and they price very differently, so the support is the first thing to establish on any lot offered under this name. At the top sit the unique paintings, oil or mixed media on canvas and on chassis. Below them come the dibond prints, aluminium mounted and issued in editions as small as six, and works on Arches paper in comparable numbers, which the representing galleries retail in the low hundreds of euros. He also makes sculpture in acrylic glass. The gap between a unique canvas and a print of six is the whole of the valuation question, and because the editions are so small a mistake in either direction is expensive. LLB Auction has sold a single work under this name, an untitled oil on canvas, which made a four figure sum in euros at double its low estimate and remains the only result the house holds. There is no published literature on his output, so a consignor should expect the documentation from the representing gallery to carry the weight: the edition number and total as written, the support named exactly, the signature photographed, and the reverse of the panel or canvas recorded in full.