At aged 30, Alexandre Monteiro (alias Hopare) is already a prominent figure of the French Street art and even of the contemporary French art scene in general. His art mixes spontaneity and diversity. Starting as a graffiti artist, Alex has no limits nowadays of which medium to use, or even the technique he uses as witnesses his capacity of producing oil on canvas as well as sculpture or even giant street art frescoes.

He works on various mediums depending on his envy and inspirations. As per his creative process, he does not have any strict calculation: Hopare is an artist of the instant that realises his art works with freestyle without having a precise model established prior to his creations.

Each project is a way to develop his own aesthetic and natural vocabulary, made of lines, intertwining colours, perspectives and sketches or even geometrics and abstracts curves. He has created his own identity, without renouncing of the influences others had on him such as his teachers: artists from street art, paintings or interior designers.

Profoundly eternal globe-trotter, Hopare creates his art like a travel notebook where each piece is referring to a meeting, a place or a particular event. Each work is a way to serve humanity and to transport the spectator : he nourishes his creativity and imagination by travelling the world to offer to us a singular and intense representation of our universe where mixes abstraction, idealisation, aestheticism and speech.

Thus, the artist attached himself to create bridgeway between times, people and cultures. The art that he defends is the one of evolution, changes, passing and the eternal quest of search. He is always interested in new and future development and he is inspired by learning from others, previous generations and the ones of now. His young age does not stop him from having various experiences, you can seem him in the corner of a street in the centre of Paris, on a wall in Atlanta, in a group show at the Seoul MoMA and so on.

Curriculum Vitae.

Please find below a small video footage about the artist.

SOLÈNE wants the viewer to explore and understand the world of each artist by entering their studio life, their daily exploration or even a show, a project that has marked them but more generally SOLÈNE’s vision is for the viewers to see what inspire them, their artistic process and what they wish to share and transmit.

Hopare, you are working on the paintings, engraving, sculpture, and mostly street arts, urban frescoes. Your street work often spans across entire buildings. How do you work? Do you do everything freestyle or do you work on drawings, notes, sketches or on your phone?

The work starts on travel notebooks, sketching from childhood, or encountering from diverse culture along my travels…. people that touched me with whom I shared a meal, a bed or a story…. On the wall, I work directly on the visual with my iPhone and my spray gun. I start each fresco by an abstract language, a sort of “scribbles” it may seem for the person that is looking at it… but for me it is my figurative language, the one that concretely is putting on the wall.

There are many portraits of women and men from diverse continents and cultures… is it primarily this desire to communicate about our universe with many facets, full of human beings?

I travel to paint and paint to travel. The only great wealth is the other, the being, the exchange and the transmission… my art has any sense only by the meetings of others and of my inner self.

As you mentioned earlier you paint to travel, travel to paint, where is the next travel you have planned or in mind?

I would like to go back to a berbere village in the High Atlas to work on a new serie of tapestry with the local people.

Have you got a particular memory of one of your many travels you would like to share with us?

In 2018, after creating a painting at the entrance of the Dalaï-Lama, I participated of the 59th ceremony of the National Tibetan uprishing day in India. I created a serie of photography and within this serie, a flute player was amongst them.
Her family explained to me that they will soon be removed from their home and the house to be destroyed. I show them the picture of their daughter and asked if I could paint one of the external wall with it…few days later, someone explained to me that my painting is opposite the Tibetan Women’s association and became somehow the image of this association. This association is now a major political and social force with over 13 000 members out of the 150 000 exiled Tibetans. It was created in 1984 with the help of the 14th dalaï-lama with over 47 branches around the world. Two years later, the house is still there….

You recently collaborated with Dior and with Maison Fauchon and Head Pastry François Daubinet in Paris, can you tell us a bit more about those collaboration?

For Dior, it is one of their “atelier” (workshop) in Paris, I wanted to work with embroidery, create tapestries, monochromes more or less ornated…. collaborating with artisans, always in the search of beautiful works created from hands. Haute-Couture and Painting are similar in the sense of the creativity and the research of it.
With François Daubinet at Fauchon in Paris again I was confronted to a new medium, a chocolate desert created from the meeting of Art & high end Gastronomy.
Art is a wonderful permanent energy of renewal and challenges and some sort of emergency. I come from the street art and therefore I had to learn to work with huge constraints which are very stimulating.

A dream, a wall, a building in a city you wish to leave your trace?

A museum …like Le Louvre or the MoMA in N.Y.C and most of all the recognition of street art in the streets, in the daily lives, in caves which would become “museums” or “galleries” themselves.