Birds

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 panel, 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 countless times. The surface thus ceases to be the passive ground of the painting; it becomes an active field that carries its own history, upon which new marks are added. The acrylic tag marker I use on this surface takes the line beyond being merely a contour. While drawing the boundaries of the figures, I follow the continuity and rhythm of a tagging action, lifting my hand as little as possible. I do not "draw" predetermined 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 all else, a bodily trace, a record of gesture and action. This approach enters into dialogue with Jackson Pollock's understanding of gesture, which transforms the painting surface into a field of bodily movement, and with the historical legacy of Jean-Michel Basquiat's street-derived language of signs, writing, figures, and direct drawing. However, the aim here is not to reproduce these artists' visual language, but to rethink the shared performative roots of abstract expressionist gesture and the graffiti tag within a contemporary figurative system. As the line repeats, the figures multiply. Faces, bodies, and organic forms that emerge side by side, layered, and interpenetrating are never exact replicas of one another. 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 multiplying within itself. In particular, the convergence of forms that evoke the human and the animal renders the fixed and definitive boundaries of identity increasingly ambiguous. Here, the "signature" quality of graffiti also transforms. The tag is normally the act of making oneself visible in public space, of saying "I was here." In my practice, however, this personal mark multiplies as it repeats, 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 and patternless area I leave around the compositions creates a second context for this transformation. This area, functioning like a kind of mat, implies a piece of wall detached 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 transplants 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 through the superimposition of body, mark, memory, and movement. Painting here transforms less into a representation of an image than into a record of a continuous process of becoming that takes place on a surface.

• Painting Type: Acrylic
• Year: 2025
• Style: Abstract
• Subject Matter: Figure
• Surface: Wood Panel
• 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: 16
• Certificate: Certificate of Authenticity, Artist Certificate