The series of drawings Big Apple's puzzles started during a 3-month stay in New York in 2012 thanks to the HORS LES MURS PROGRAMME of the Paris FRENCH INSTITUTE.
This series is a work in progress whose purpose is to draw a succession of 49 snapshots of New York associated to 49 very elliptic texts (2-3 lines), kinds of haiku poems in English.

While wandering in the city (Big Apple), I was struck both by the architecture and the population (Occupy Wall Street was still topical). Deeply impressed by the grid patterns of the streets, the glass buildings, the diffrated reflections that artificial light was only amplifying, I tried to  recreate this fragmented identity.

In this kind of transparent and coloured puzzle, people follow their lonely course. Most of them are in motion, but some of them are inert, lying asleep on the pavements. The drawings evoke this assembling of undulatory fragments, this puzzle of Big Apple, into which human shapes fiinally seem to melt and disappear.

The use of the black and white refers to New York's musical History, one of the capitals of jazz (Harlem), closely connected to that of slavery and racial segregation between whites and blacks.

Black ultra fine point permanent marker; notepad 70g, ruled with margin, American Letter format (21,6x27,9cm); negative inversion process of the drawings with Photoshop and printing on A4 paper.

Clara Maïda, June 2014