So, you found a work of art?

Lucky you. Register it here.

Name's M. Récup (see disclaimer below *). I paint things. What you found, that's one of mine.

Do me a favor and register your piece using that button below. Call it provenance if you want to sound fancy. I call it keeping track.

Now it's yours. Keep it, hang it, hide it in your closet — I don't care. Give it to someone you love if you're feeling sentimental. Better yet, give it to someone you can't stand. That takes real imagination.

By picking this thing up off the street, you've already proven you're not like the rest of the sheep sleepwalking through their climate-controlled lives. You stopped. You looked. You took something that wasn't nailed down and nobody was selling. That's either courage or petty larceny, and not knowing you, I'm not sure which.

Who knows? Maybe this is the butterfly that flaps its wings and changes everything. Probably not. But it beats scrolling through your phone waiting for someone else to tell you what matters.

Welcome to the experiment, kid.

FAQ

This website features M. Récup, a fictional artist created for entertainment and artistic purposes. M. Récup is not a real person, and any biographical information, artistic statements, quotes, interviews, or other content attributed to this artist is entirely fictional and part of an ongoing creative project. And it is also, hopefully, for your enjoyment. The art, though, is real and belongs to its creator. To learn more: myartcommons@gmail.com

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Meet M. Récup*

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Fake photo generated by sycophantic chatbot named Ava. Phony bio generated by a different robot, who is a better wordsmith.

M. Récup* never meant to become an artist. He meant to eat.

Born to French-Canadian parents who understood that America promised work, not dreams, Récup spent his twenties breaking his back in warehouses, on loading docks, anywhere that paid cash on Friday. His hands were covered with calluses before they were covered with paint.

At thirty-two, somebody handed him a paintbrush — the house-painting kind. Turns out he was good at covering things up. Walls, mistakes, the past. He did it for money until the day he realized he could paint simply to paint. Something clicked.

His canvases look like crime scenes at first. Think Jackson Pollock after a three-day bender, or Andy Warhol if Warhol had ever done an honest day's work. Récup still throws paint like a man settling accounts, creating images that are somehow both brutal and mass-produced at the same time, violent and oddly tender. Critics called his style "proletarian expressionism." He called it Tuesday.

"Art is just evidence," he once told an interviewer who made the mistake of using the word "oeuvre." "I'm just documenting the crime scene of being alive."

He painted obsessively for years, trying to build a reputation among people who mattered and trying even harder to annoy people who thought they did. Then, somewhere around his sixty-fifth birthday, Récup realized the game was rigged. He was like the guy who suddenly sees that he's been playing poker with marked cards. So he torched the deck.

Now, he leaves paintings in coffee shops, hands them to strangers on the subway, props them against dumpsters like foundlings waiting for adoption. Nothing for sale.

"I spent years trying to make things people wanted to own," he says. "Turns out it was mostly a con, driven by scarcity, slick marketing and dumb luck. The truth is, only you can decide if a painting strikes your fancy. If it does, you'll pay. If it leaves you cold, that piece isn't worth the canvas it's painted on. But here's the catch: Only people with scratch get to make choices like that. This is my way of evening the score just a little bit."

M. Récup lives in a cramped rent-controlled apartment that smells like turpentine, stale coffee and cigarettes. He paints, he smokes too much, he watches Netflix with his cat Clyde. And then he does it again. And he's more than little annoyed that you now know as much as you do.