2020 edition, Permanent art work
De l'art des enseignes - "Shop Signs"
Le Géant de Nantes
Éric Croes

By offering local businesses the chance to have artists reinterpret their signage, Le Voyage involves some of the city’s most active members in the creative process.

Éric Croes creates hybrid objects that are born of fables and legends, cadavres exquis, popular culture, outsider or tribal art, memories of childhood passions, and objects discovered in archaeology museums. For the haberdashery Falbalas Saint-Junien, he has created a benevolent giant in grandiloquent headgear. Covered in an array of lucky charms, this “good genie” has vowed to protect the boutique and surrounding streets, wearing a beaver’s tale (allusion to the original shop named “Au vrai castor” or “The True Beaver”), references to Nantes and its maritime symbols (Neptune’s trident – which refers to the city’s motto, “Neptune favours those who travel”), as well as different protective symbols (a clover, a mano cornuto)…

 

Éric Croes was born in 1978. He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
He is represented by the gallery Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels, and Richard Heller in Los Angeles