Diabolical Kingdom

ABSTRACT GRAFFITI These figurative works, which I call Abstract Graffiti, are a painting practice that explores 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 juxtaposing graffiti's direct and personal act of marking 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 multiple times across time. The surface thus ceases to be a passive ground for 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 drawing the boundaries of figures, I follow the continuity and rhythm of a tagging action by 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 being a means of representation, 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 languages, but to rethink the shared actionable roots of abstract expressionist gesture and the graffiti tag within a contemporary figurative system. As the line is repeated, figures multiply. Faces, bodies, and organic forms that emerge side by side, overlapping, and intertwining are never exactly identical to one another. Figures that derive from each other behave like variations and visual mutations. The singular figure gradually loses its importance; its place is taken by a collective body, an anonymous crowd, or an organism that multiplies within itself. The convergence of forms that evoke both human and animal further blurs the fixed and definitive boundaries of identity. Here, graffiti's quality as a "signature" 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 is repeated, transforms 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, pattern-free area I leave around the compositions creates a second context for this transformation. This area, which functions like a kind of mat, implies a piece of wall detached from the street, or the re-framing of a public surface within a gallery. The work thus positions itself on the boundary between public space and institutional art space, between a free mark and a 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 transform into visual memory. The figures that ultimately emerge are neither purely portraits nor purely patterns. They are visual organisms formed by the overlapping of body, mark, memory, and movement. Painting here transforms from representing an image into a record of a continuous process of becoming that takes place on a surface.

• Painting Type: Acrylic
• Year: 2026
• Style: Abstract
• Subject Matter: Figure
• Surface: Wood Panel
• Dimensions: Width: 70 × Height: 100 × Depth: 0.04
• Orientation: Vertical/Portrait
• Frame: Unframed
• Color Palette: Multicolor
• Technique: Brush Work
• Finish: Varnished
• Signature: Signed
• Condition: Excellent
• Authenticity: Original
• Edition: Edition Number: 8
• Certificate: Certificate of Authenticity, Artist Certificate