Virtuous Cat

ABSTRACT GRAFFITI These figurative works, which I call Abstract Graffiti, represent 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 face to face 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 evoke 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 history, 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 figures, I follow the continuity and rhythm of a tagging act, 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 means of representation. This approach enters into dialogue with the historical legacy of Jackson Pollock's gestural understanding, which transformed 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 these artists' visual languages; rather, it is to rethink the shared performative 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, layered, and interlocked are never exact replicas of one another. Related figures derived from each other 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 blurs the fixed and definitive boundaries of identity. Here, the "signature" quality of graffiti also transforms. A 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, transforms into the boundary of a 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, patternless area I leave around the compositions creates a second context for this transformation. Operating like a kind of mat board, 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 transplants 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 layering of body, mark, memory, and movement. Here, painting transforms from representing an image into becoming a record of a continuous process of becoming that unfolds on a surface.

• Painting Type: Acrylic
• Year: 2024
• 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