Pink Forest

ABSTRACT GRAFFITI These figurative works, which I call Abstract Graffiti, constitute 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, 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 countless times. 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 tracing the boundaries of the figures, I follow the continuity and rhythm of a tag 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 being a means of representation, a bodily trace, a record of gesture and action. This approach enters into dialogue with the historical legacy of Jackson Pollock's gestural understanding — which transforms the painting surface into a field of bodily movement — and 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 actional roots of abstract expressionist gesture and 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, layered, and intertwined with one another are never exactly identical to each other. Kindred figures derived from one another behave like variations and visual mutations. The singular figure gradually loses its importance; in its place comes 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 renders the fixed and definitive boundaries of identity increasingly ambiguous. Here, graffiti's quality of "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 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, patternless area I leave around the compositions creates a second context for this transformation. Operating like a kind of mat, this area implies a piece of wall detached from the street, or the reframing of a public surface within a gallery. Thus the work situates 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 carries graffiti aesthetics into painting. The works investigate how gesture produces an identity, how repetition transforms individuality, and how marks left on a surface become a form of visual memory. The figures that ultimately emerge are neither solely portraits nor solely patterns. They are visual organisms formed by the superimposition 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: 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: 3
• Certificate: Certificate of Authenticity, Artist Certificate