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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, concealing, 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 a painting and 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 a mere 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 anything else, a bodily trace, a record of gesture and action rather than a tool of representation. 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 graffiti tagging within a contemporary figurative system. As the line is repeated, figures multiply. Faces, bodies, and organic forms that emerge side by side, overlapping, and interlocking 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; in its place emerges a collective body, an anonymous crowd, or an organism multiplying within itself. The convergence of forms that evoke both the human and the animal further obscures the fixed and definitive 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 is repeated, transforms into the boundary of the figure, and eventually begins to dissolve individual identity within an anonymous visual crowd. The signature shifts from identity to pattern; from pattern to body; from body back to a mark. The colored and patternless area I leave around the compositions creates a second context for this transformation. This area, functioning as a kind of mat, 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 the institutional art space, between the free mark and the framed art object. In this sense, Abstract Graffiti 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 are converted 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 becomes less a representation of an image and more a record of a continuous process of becoming that unfolds 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: 17
• Certificate: Certificate of Authenticity, Artist Certificate