“Cultivating the spirit of freedom and creativity of the sixties”: Djo, the rock artist from Sète, exhibits in Montpellier

Éric Chazotte, alias Djo, dans son jardin avec ses œuvres. Midi Libre – Thomas Ancona-Léger

À l’occasion de sa soirée consacrée au rock sétois, le Secret Place de Montpellier met à l’honneur le travail de Djo, chanteur et plasticien à l’origine d’un grand nombre de pochettes d’album.

Djo. The nickname goes back to childhood. “The era of mobs, of the wild expedition where they called me Djo the Indian”, replaces Éric Chazotte, his real name. At 56, this unconditional fan of detective stories and spaghetti westerns is a key figure in Sète rock. Singer of Sonic Preachers, he is also the one who signs most of the album covers of local groups. An art that he also declines in paintings, and which will be displayed from August 10 at the Secret Place in Montpellier, the Mecca of punk rock in Occitania, as part of a monographic exhibition.

Series B

“I started making collages when I was 18 and since then, I've never stopped”, confides the rocker. Images, often gleaned from the magazines of the 1970s, which he affixes to form compositions bursting with color that recall certain B-movie posters. We come across planes, racing cars, guns and of course pin-ups, often very “bad ass”, who burst out of the frame. Very virile symbols, certainly, but which never fall into vulgarity or bad kitsch. “The women I represent are always powerful, in a position of domination : for me it is a way of paying homage to them”, supports the artist, a printer by profession, who claims to want to “perpetuate this popular art of color”.

Hantology

The advent of the mass internet has gradually changed his creative process. Djo now finds his images on the web rather than in magazines. “I grab crappy jpeg files that I then redraw”, he explains. With him, there is no copyright or credit: “I don't ask permission and I only sign my paintings, everything else, everyone is free to take”. A libertarian and “open source”  spiritultimately very rock’roll which, upon closer inspection, turns out to be particularly consistent with its medium, collage. Mixing reference signs in a semiology that borrows as much from Scorsese's films as from Tarantino's cinema, Djo practices in a plastic art version what Derrida and later the critic Mark Fisher called hauntology in music. Or the way of reviving the past through signs and symbols while updating it.

Because it is indeed an aesthetic, that of the 1960s-1970s, that haunts Djo's work. “I am not nostalgic for that time, I am simply trying to cultivate the spirit of freedom and creativity that characterized it, he says, specifying, I want to establish a direct relationship between my work and the person viewing it, there should be no need for explanation”. No explanation then, but an observation: Djo is not about to hang up his brush or his microphone.

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