The miracle of sainte Waudru / HONET
Honet started doing graffiti in Paris in 1988. He found this form of expression to be something totally innovative, as the mirror of our time. He turned it into his way of life, and then plunged body and soul into this artistic odyssey that has always kept him away from a conventional occupation. Honet likes to explore the city, particularly the WW II bunkers and catacombs of Paris. He searches for hidden places full of stories, where people cannot go. For Honet, graffiti and exploration share a taste for adventure and the discovery of one’s own city. This graphic universe is composed in particular of headlamps, stairs, trapdoors and keys as if he were searching for invisible, subterranean worlds. "I go where my anxieties attract me," he says. I like to explore dark, chaotic, destroyed and violent places. Painting is a way to tame and appropriate them.” A fervent traveller, Honet travels the world to have fun, to discover, to paint and also to exhibit his recent work. He has been leaving his mark in Europe but also in Moscow, Beijing or Tokyo for more than 25 years. In addition, he regularly collaborates with brands such as Prada, Lacoste, Ruby or Louis Vuitton that attach importance to the symbolism of his drawings and their pure lines. The pictorial intervention concerns all the windows of the building. Honet has here interpreted the miracle of the Brewers of Saint Waudru in his distinctive graphic style. All the ingredients of the story are present: the four brewers chained in a dark prison, the guard dressed in yellow and black in the colours of Saint Waudru's chapterhouse and of course, ever monumental and masterful, Saint Waudru herself, performing the miracle of freeing the prisoners by breaking their chains. During the Golden Coach Procession on the Sunday of the Ducasse ritual, the place where the Rue des Soeurs grises crosses the Rue des Capucins is chosen for the reading of one of the 5 Miracles of Saint Waudru: In the sixteenth century, four brewers accused of a capital crime without any formal proof, managed to escape from their prison and, but instead of running away, they took their chains along and went to the altar of Saint Waudru who, during her lifetime, had devoted so much of her efforts and property to free prisoners. So the four brewers begged St. Waudru, imploring her to free them. The chains were broken and fell to the ground. Saint Waudru had thus shown that they were innocent.