Secondary Market
Rero
French, born 1983
Rero (Alexis Devevey, born 1983) is a French conceptual artist known for phrases set in Verdana capitals and crossed out with a black bar. Moving between walls, books, landscapes and museums, his “image negation” questions what words, images and digital culture really tell us.
Biography
Rero is the name of Alexis Devevey, a French artist born in 1983 who began painting graffiti in the south of Paris in the mid-1990s. A foundation year at the London College of Communication in 2004–2005 pushed him to drop the image altogether and work with text alone — the starting point of what he calls “image negation”. He now lives in Rio de Janeiro.
Words that cancel themselves
His signature is instantly legible: a short phrase in Verdana, the default typeface of the early web, struck through by a thick black line. The statement is offered and withdrawn in the same gesture, inviting reflection on self-censorship, intellectual property, consumption and the flood of digital information. The acronym WYSIWYG — “what you see is what you get”, borrowed from computing — recurs across his work, as do old books sealed in resin, which turn knowledge into a closed object.
Between the street and the museum
Rero’s interventions range from abandoned buildings and deserts, including Death Valley, to major Paris institutions: DO NOT CROSS THE LINE on the escalators of the Centre Pompidou in 2013, and PAS ESSENTIEL across the façade of the CENTQUATRE during the closures of 2021. He has shown at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (2007), the Musée de la Poste (Au-delà du street art, 2012) and the Grand Palais (2013), and was included in the collectors’ survey De leur temps (4) in Nantes.
Galleries and books
Rero has worked with Backslash Gallery in Paris since his first solo show there in 2011, and with Fabien Castanier Gallery from IMAGE NOT AVAILABLE in Los Angeles (2012) to IMAGO in Miami Beach (2022). His books include Image Négation (Critères Éditions, 2012) and Via Negativa (Skira, 2020).