Showing posts with label Jeff Soto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jeff Soto. Show all posts

Sunday 12 April 2020

Diggin In The Archives 2

Another seven days of posting photos of street art dredged from the archives. In lockdown you have plenty of time with your thoughts and the wandering mind generates random recollections. Those which stand out lead to a photo being thrust into the limelight. So there was some kind of logical process behind the selection of images from week 3 in lockdown, even if the process is irrefutable evidence of lockdown fever.

In 2009 Jeff Soto painted some awesome street art in Shoreditch. Graffoto reviewed his StolenSpace show Inland Empire starting per Graffoto's wont with a look at some street art. At time of the review 4 pieces of Jeff Soto street art in Shoreditch had been found, this beauty was the 5th, his “Thanks London”. Ultimately there were 6.

Jeff Soto 2009
Jeff Soto, 2009


On the Posher fringes of the Notting Hill - Paddington border this was an unexpected mewsy location full of character. Paul Insect's spider was the size of a small child and provoked the awe of this big child.

Paul Insect, 2009
Paul Insect, Paddington, 2009


Vhils was pretty much the star of Cans Festival in 2008, he returned in 2009 and created some awesome art. This pair of portraits in Camden were amazing, the technique is basically removing the hoarding surface, like chiselling or drilling perhaps but quite how the patterned effect on the other portrait was achieved best remains an artistic mystery.

Vhils 2009
Vhils, Camden, 2009


Vhils 2009
Vhils, Camden, 2009


If interiors designers could replicate the distressed wood effect of 124 Hackney Road it would be in every wooden staircase in Islington - oh wait! Many many lovely pieces of art appeared on this faƧade at the beginning of the last decade, it is actually sad to see it looking so sterile these days. This collaboration between Ella et Pitr and Macay complimented that surface beautifully.

Ella et Pir and macay collab, 2010
Ella et Pitr & Macay, Shoreditch, 2010


For many years my mental equilibrium was both preserved and yet shattered by daily breaks from the grindstone for walks with photography companion and art show/drinking/blog buddy Sam Martin aka Howaboutno. Anything could happen and rarely did. One lunchbreak we spotted a pair of traffic wardens about a hundred yards distant, something made us suspect they weren't run of the mill meter maids. Turned out it was Tinsel Edwards and Twinkle Troughton ticketing parked cars with spoof parking ticket/artworks. I still have mine. Bonkers but fun, these days its just charity chuggers and product samples.

Read about the ire they provoked on the streets on Graffoto.co.uk

Tinsel Edwards & Twinkle Troughton, Oct 2009
Tinsel Edwards and Twinkle Troughton, Oct 2009


Tinsel Edwards & Twinkle Troughton, Oct 2009
Parking Ticket


Tinsel Edwards & Twinkle Troughton, Oct 2009
“Best of Times, Worst of Times”, ed 500


Is it an armada of invading toaster erupting from a portal or toasters being sucked into a black abyss? It was 2009. The genius of something so banal! You could not help but smile every time you saw Toasters sporting the colours of Wolverhampton Wanderers home kit pop up, except when it was in the away end cos that generally signalled home defeat for QPR.

Toasters, 2009
Toasters, Kingsland Road, 2009


Phlegm, one of my fav artists, has been doing a very entertaining series of daily sketches of life in lockdown in his own unique style. Yesterday's was a characteristically Heath Robinson bike.

Phlegm (permission to use in instagram message)
Phlegm, “Bike maintenance”, 2020


Here is a couple of photos which “interrogates the boundary” between hipster bikes and street art. "AMAZING" is by Eine from 2009. The dude on the elevated bike which looks like the prototype for Phlegm's drawing must surely have had an interesting time doing emergency stops (2008). In the background is a fragment of Eine’s 2008 EXCITING.

I could have responded to the theme with photos of street art where my bike accidentally encroached on the shot, got loads of thosešŸ˜‚

AMAZING Unicyclist, art by Eine
AMAZING unicyclist, Hackney Road, 2009


Exciting cyclist, art by Eine
EXCITING two storey bike, Old St, 2008


Art credits and links are by each photo. All photos: Dave Stuart

Monday 18 May 2009

Jeff Soto – Inland Empire

Stolen Space Gallery
London
14 May – 7 June 2009


all photos: NoLionsInEngland

One characteristic of the austere and spendthrift new age we live in is that the great American giants of the urban art scene have been noticeable by their absence from London this year – give or take a Ron English show in the past week. Jeff Soto bucks the trend by coming to Stolen Space for a new solo show – hold on to that sentence, turn it over and over and see how many words make you feel gooooood.

Wandering over to the Truman Brewery last Friday to have a daylight peek at the show we un-expectedly find Jeff Soto merrily painting away on an outside wall, and some would have us believe that this is the first time in a long time he has painted without the benefit of a ceiling.


Jeff Soto Lives


Soto eschews the purists pre-occupation with the spray can, applying his acrylic paints with a “normal” sized art paintrush. The fine-ness of the draughtsmanship leads to a plea for loan of a finer paint brush, we didn’t have the nerve to make our offer of a strand of hair too loudly. I say “we”, this is the royal version as of the small bunch of observers I was the only one who actually bothers with a comb these days.


Greetings From California!


Stretching my employer’s patience over what constitutes a reasonable length Friday lunch break, I wander down to the Whitechapel end of Brick Lane and find two more Soto wall pieces. A third is Work in progress and a forth remains un-discovered –something to chance upon in the near future hopefully.




Soto’s “Inland Empire” show presents 21 new acrylic on wood paintings and a couple of small edition prints. First glance suggests a kind of sci-fi futurism in a world of ghostly plants, dark galactic spaces and furry mutants.


Love Can Surpass All Obstacles


Many of the compositions have a slightly bleak or post-apocalyptic landscape effect with recognisable “old world” features, a car here, telegraph wires there with centre stage taken by fragments of shattered remnants of a ruined eco-system.


Flag Carrier


Soto’s work is reported as featuring strong personal and political themes and with this show the chosen role is harbinger of environmental doom. Nature’s Wrath shows a fanged beast of various flora suspended in a demi-world of noxious fumes and sparking chemical eruptions set above a blasted landscape featuring a nodding onshore oil pump.


Nature’s Wrath


Soto’s concepts are painted at various scales, with orbital circles suggesting paths of atoms at the sub-molecular level, rising up to exploding cars at the human scale and Mother Earth bearing the scars of man’s poisonous destructive activity at the grandest scale. All on the same painting.


Decay And Rebirth


Motifs which recur include rictus grins of a skeletal gumset whether actually in a skull or in a symbolic world-as-furry-mutant, and overgrown shaggy hair, fur or foliage. In Self-Destructive, Soto appears to reference a idea that nature herself lures us with her beauty but prompts us to destroy it to access her rich minerals, woods and oils.


Self Destructive


Scrutiny of the detail reveal an astonishing precision to the painting, an illustrator’s skilled hand being very evident. Although the themes are dark and dense, the paintings themselves posses a wonderful warmth.


Diamonds (detail)


Many of the paintings are done with a very surrealist composition with fantasy futuristic overtones. One tends to be reminded of the lurid covers of books in that certain section of the municipal library where only the sci-fi geek, the day-of-the-triffids nerd and the lost dare wander.


I.E. Moon


Furry animals and shaggy haired humans populate some of the pictures, the tufted fleece of these figures echoes something like the accepted representation of a mammoth’s coat (how do the palaeontologists know what that looked like?), perhaps in Soto’s future world our fate has been to endure a reverse evolution to survive the perilous environment he has created. It is not clear in the “Self Portrait” is Soto beating his breast and accepting blame or pleading victim status. At first glance I thought he had painted himself enjoying a toke through his pre-neanderthal beard.


Riverside Self Portrait


Fantasy art, sci-fi books and comics are the last refuge of the irretrievably adolescent and I have never been able to get any further than Douglas Adams, so it comes as a shock to me to find that I love Jeff Soto’s work. “Inland Empires” was so good it prompted something that the last dozen shows since Kid Acne at Stella Dore have failed to do – it restored my enthusiasm for uploading a few pics and banging out a few words.


Turqoise Skull


Words can’t do justice to either the content of Soto’s painting or to the beauty of his craft so compensate for the inadequacies of the write up by checking a set of show pics here: