Fear

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 the public space on wooden panels, by contrasting 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 merely 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 space that carries its own past, upon which new marks are added. The acrylic tag marker I use on this surface removes the line from being merely a contour. While drawing the boundaries of the figures, I follow the continuity and rhythm of a tag 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 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 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, overlapping, and intertwining are never exact replicas of one another. Kindred figures derived from one another 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 evoking the human and the animal in particular further blurs the fixed and definite boundaries of identity. Here, graffiti's quality as a "signature" also transforms. The tag is normally an act of making the artist visible in public space, of saying "I was here." In my practice, however, this personal mark multiplies as it repeats, transforms into the boundary of the figure, and eventually 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. Operating as a kind of mat, this area implies a fragment 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 transposes 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. Painting here transforms less into a representation of an image, and more into a record of a continuous process of becoming that takes place on a surface.

• Painting Type: Acrylic
• Year: 2023
• 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: 9
• Certificate: Certificate of Authenticity, Artist Certificate