World

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 panels, 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, obscuring, revealing, and partial erasure of different colors evokes the visual memory of urban walls that have been painted, worn, and rewritten many times over. The surface thus ceases to be the passive ground of the painting and 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 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. This approach enters into dialogue with the historical legacy of Jackson Pollock's understanding of gesture — which transforms the painting surface into a field of bodily movement — and Jean-Michel Basquiat's street-derived 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 common 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 intertwined 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 evoking both human and animal further blurs the fixed and definitive boundaries of identity. Here, too, graffiti's quality of "signature" is transformed. A tag is normally the act by which the artist makes themselves visible in public space — an act 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 shifts from identity to pattern; from pattern to body; from body back to sign. 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 fragment of wall severed from the street, or the reframing of a public surface within a gallery. The work is thus positioned on the boundary between public space and institutional art space, between free mark and 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 through the layering of body, sign, memory, and movement. Here, painting transforms from the representation of an image into a record of a continuous process of becoming taking place on a surface.

• Painting Type: Acrylic
• Year: 2025
• Style: Contemporary
• 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: 6
• Certificate: Certificate of Authenticity, Artist Certificate