Dirty Crowd

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 the direct and personal act of marking in graffiti 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 of different colors — covering, revealing, and partially erasing one another — 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 painting; it becomes an active field that carries its own past, 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" 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 gesture, and a record of 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-rooted language of signs, 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 the 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, overlapping, and intertwining are never exact replicas of one another. Figures derived from one another behave like variations and visual mutations. The singular figure gradually loses its importance; in its place arises a collective body, an anonymous crowd, or an organism that multiplies within itself. The convergence of forms evoking the human and the animal, in particular, further blurs the fixed and definite 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, pattern-free area I leave around the compositions creates a second context for this transformation. Operating as a kind of mat, this area implies a fragment of wall detached from the street, or the re-framing of a public surface within a gallery. In this way, the work positions itself at the boundary between public space and institutional art space, between the free mark and the framed art object. In this sense, Abstract Graffiti goes beyond being a series that brings graffiti aesthetics into painting. The works investigate how gesture produces identity, how repetition transforms individuality, and how the marks left on a surface become a form of 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 from a representation of an image into a record of a continuous process of becoming that takes place on a surface.

• Painting Type: Acrylic
• Year: 2025
• Style: Abstract Expressionism
• 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: 4
• Certificate: Certificate of Authenticity, Artist Certificate