Street signs’ artist, Clet Abraham

The freedom of street art in Florence

In Florence, even street signs are pieces of art. Playful, funny, irreverent, hundreds of signs dot the landscape. They’re all the work of the street artist who goes by “Clet,” who saw an opportunity to do something different in a place imbued in history.

“The relation with the past is interesting,” Clet Abraham said, “because, of course, you can’t do the same kind of art.” The 52-year-old Frenchman moved to Florence 14 years ago, barely scraping by. “My life was difficult because I was a painter but without success. So, it was difficult to pay the rent.”

Down on his luck, he looked to the street as his canvas. “I make a sticker. I put it on the street sign. Two days after, for the first time in 20 years, a newspaper called me. So, I say, ‘I think I have a good idea!'” he laughed.

Locals soon took note of the plastic stickers plastering the city’s signs. “It started with an intuition. I realized that street signs use a very simple, almost universal language. As it was a research of a language common to all. It’s a visual language. The question is: how to communicate to a vast number of people in the most direct way possible? So I started to draw playing with this language. Initially, I maybe had some interesting ideas, but I put them aside,” he said.

At first, officials weren’t pleased. “They tried to remove everything. But I was quicker to put it again.”

“This idea met another part of me, this part of my character that does not accept any form of imposition. I realized that street signs represent a continuous imposition in our lives. While the public space belongs to all of us, every street is marked with impositions against which we have no right to oppose. The street signs are not democratic. Then, there in Florence. Florence, who wants to be the city of arts but is completely covered with street signs. On one hand in Florence, you can’t touch a wall, you can’t draw a tag, because it’s blasphemous, but on the other side the city is filled with the street signs,” he explained.

Today, he has fans worldwide. Clients pay thousands of dollars for his art.
And now he’s even leaving his mark in America. He just installed a giant nose on a Wrong Way sign at a Los Angeles intersection. “I don’t make any damage, I just do it better,” he said.

Doing it better … a mantra from an artist always looking for the sign.

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