Aziz Kuzgun

ABSTRACT GRAFFITI These figurative works, which I call Abstract Graffiti, are a painting practice that investigates the relationship between gesture, body, repetition, urban surface, and visual identity. The works reconstruct a visual language belonging to public space on wooden panels, by bringing graffiti's direct and personal act of marking into dialogue with painting's historical understanding of gesture. The surfaces I create with acrylic paint on wooden panels are treated not as the background of a single image, but as layered and continuously transforming palimpsests. The overlapping, covering, revealing, and partial erasure of different colors evokes the visual memory of urban walls that have been painted over, worn down, and rewritten many times. The surface thus ceases to be the passive ground of painting; it becomes an active field that carries its own past, onto which new marks are added. The acrylic tag marker I use on this surface takes the line beyond being merely a contour. While tracing the boundaries of figures, I follow the continuity and rhythm of a tagging act, lifting my hand as little as possible. I do not "draw" pre-determined figures in the traditional sense; I establish a direct relationship between the movement of the hand and the emergence of the figure. For this reason, the line is, before anything else, a bodily trace, a record of gesture and action. This approach enters into a dialogue with the historical legacy of Jackson Pollock's understanding of gesture—which transforms the painting surface into a field of bodily movement—and Jean-Michel Basquiat's language of street-derived marks, writing, figures, and direct drawing. However, the aim here is not to reproduce the visual language of these artists, but to rethink the shared performative roots of abstract expressionist gesture and the graffiti tag within a contemporary figurative system. As the line is repeated, the figures multiply. Faces, bodies, and organic forms that emerge side by side, one on top of another, and interwoven with each other are never exactly identical. Figures that derive from one another behave like variations and visual mutations. The singular figure gradually loses its importance; in its place emerges a collective body, an anonymous crowd, or an organism that multiplies within itself. The convergence of forms that evoke both the human and the animal further blurs the fixed and definitive boundaries of identity. Here, the "signature" quality of graffiti also transforms. The tag is normally the act of making the artist visible in public space, of saying "I was here." In my practice, however, this personal mark multiplies as it is repeated, turns into the boundary of the figure, and ultimately begins to dissolve individual identity within an anonymous visual crowd. The signature transforms from identity into pattern; from pattern into body; from body back into a mark. The colored, patternless area I leave around the compositions creates a second context for this transformation. Acting as a kind of mat, this area implies a fragment of wall torn from the street, or the reframing of a public surface within a gallery. The work thus positions itself on the boundary between public space and institutional art space, between the free mark and the framed art object. Abstract Graffiti, in this sense, goes beyond being a series that brings graffiti aesthetics into painting. The works investigate how gesture produces identity, how repetition transforms individuality, and how marks left on a surface turn into visual memory. The figures that ultimately emerge are neither purely portraits nor purely patterns. They are visual organisms formed by the superimposition of body, mark, memory, and movement. Here, painting transforms less into the representation of an image and more into the record of a continuous process of becoming that takes place on a surface.

• Painting Type: Acrylic
• Year: 2025
• Style: Abstract
• Subject Matter: Figure
• Surface: Canvas
• Dimensions: Width: 70 × Height: 100 × Depth: 0.4
• Orientation: Vertical/Portrait
• Frame: Unframed
• Color Palette: Multicolor
• Technique: Brush Work
• Finish: Varnished
• Signature: Signed
• Condition: Excellent
• Authenticity: Original
• Edition: Edition Number: 13
• Certificate: Certificate of Authenticity, Artist Certificate