Muse Of The Week: Pacer

Pacer is the alias of a young scoundrel/visual artist based here in Lagos, Nigeria whose works currently experiments with spray paint. He says his alias is inspired by street art and graffiti culture, and art form where artists reclaim public spaces by creating art on walls without the permission of the authorities. So to circumvent the long arm of the law catching up with their creative (illegal) endeavors, graffiti artists come up with a num de plume to avoid being apprehended. Although Pacer is neither of those things, he’s just an artist inspired by the aesthetics of street culture while flashing his middle finger at the elitist tendencies of the Lagos art scene.

Pacer is a self-trained visual artist, who explores and experiments with various mediums such as collage, pen drawings and more recently aerosol paint. Drawing heavily from gritty, rough and DIY approach of Graffiti and street art. With Pacer’s most recent body of works, a mock exhibition titled Warped which took place on the streets of Lagos, was inspired by wanting to capture the energy of both Graffiti and street art, using canvas as the main medium.

Exhibiting the works in public, asides from wanting to reclaim public spaces through art, looked to explore how the art scene has become increasingly exclusive to a select few and detached from the artistry aspect. The exhibition aimed to open up a discussion on the consumption of art within the Lagos art scene and whether it goes on to determine the type of art that becomes considered as valuable or not and how it affects what is in turn produced.

With his most recent work, a mock exhibition titled Warped, Pacer takes to the streets to vent his frustrations through his art, at a lack of innovation and mediocrity being pushed by individuals and institutions who are supposed to be promoting and advancing the arts in Nigeria, while at the same time pushing a DIY ideology that says you don’t need the “help” of exploitative gallery spaces to get your works out there. Pacer encourages every artist to express themselves as much as they can.