Graffoto Round Up of the Year - Part 1

Welcome pop pickers! A post I have meant to do for the last few years on Graffoto has been a look back at the year, be it a good or a bad one (the year, not the post). The problem in previous years was that I just always ended up leaving it too late in the holiday, my bingo wings thus being held down by my own weight in mince pies and turkey leftovers and sapped of the energy to bother. So whilst the intention this year was to start this post pre Christmas in the hope it kicks me up the arse to finish the rest closer to the end of the year, here I am a couple of days away from New Year's.... So it's more than likely that this will be a post that carries over into 2012. I'll split the year into 4 parts so as not to make the post so long. A picture heavy and word "lite" effort it's about my third post of the year and certainly the biggest on Graffoto. My favourite pictures and work that has gone up throughout the year, starting right at the top of January. . . All pictures are by HowAboutNo except where stated. Cept & Sweet Toof Nychos & Vibes Photo supplied by Mr S. Toof

Philth (indeed!) Kid Acne's Artfags (Spectre also on the decaying shop front sign) Plastic Bones Dscreet & Kid Acne AMAZING to see Zezao work up in London in his unmistakeable style Milo Tchais also getting up more than I remember in previous years. Roa In fact this whole spot got a lot of action in 2011, Mr Sperme popped up and knocked out this one. Shame there weren't many others. Ranking highly as my fave piece of the year...and it's a sticker :( Sadly Stormie Mills didn't paint any London walls that I found in 2011. Slipping in a little bit of South Coast action . . .I found a nice little spot closer to home in Hastings. Unfortunately I have only managed to go there once with a camera in hand. Must change that in 2012. Michael De Feo had a show in London and left a few flowers. A few artists hit the Grand Union Canal at Broadway Market one weekend in March, am not sure there was any event other than perhaps a meet at a local hostelry. . . Xenz Teddy Baden Dotmasters Just oodles of generic damage was often my highlight of the year...more in later posts but this was a big big fave. . .

Gold Peg did a few activist/occupy related pieces through the year (more later) This was the first and boldest, the ad company blocking the message out days later.

Tizer went to Leake Street and did this piece in amazing quick time. I think the squiddlywinkswould call this one SICK!

Gold Peg hit some of the most eye catching and clever spots throughout the year as far as I am concerned, proving as always that half, if not more of the work is all in the placement. My fave other placed spot this year was a piece by Revok, which featured on his blog Revok was later arrested in April 2011 for failing to pay damages to the victims of his previous vandalism crimes So that's it for part 1 of this round up which covered January to March (at least in the order I found them, as mentioned some of the pieces are years old) Part 2 to follow soon covering, you guessed it......April to June.

Black/Light - Roa, Phlegm, Robots

Bussey Building, Peckham Rye, London, SE1 54ST

25th Feb – 5th March 2011

All photos: NoLionsInEngland


Headed way down South of the river last night, really far south, way off the map to Peckham for this week’s Roa show alongside Phlegm and Robots. Roa is up everywhere but this was my first encounter with the wizardry of Phlegm.

Roa hardly needs introduction, his epic birds and beasts display feathers, veins, innards and bones on many a London Wall. He rarely does small.




In case you missed his first London solo gig at the Pure Evil Gallery, read the Graffoto snapshot here

Plegm however is long established, prolific up North and around the continent but rarely if ever sighted in the capital. He has a similar monochromatic palate to Roa, he is more suited to older crumbling walls and the insides of derelict buildings, not unlike Roa and it is easily to see why artistically he works well paired alongside Roa.




The venue starts with a claustrophobic courtyard at the end of a long passage off Rye Lane. The lumpy and irregular lighting, random shape, the ancient brickwork and the looming tower of a workhouse-like building create a classic environment for these two to populate with enormous beasts, skinny people and a Phlegm trademark wobbly looking glass. The building was “when it was built, one of Peckham’s tallest buildings”, according to the web, a wildly extravagant claim to fame it struggles hard to live up to.




Strobing trains rumble past every few minutes making the painted figures leap around the walls like a flickering gothic horror story. Like a bizarre fairytale fabricated to scare the living nightmares out of the kids, this enclosed urban canvas creates the sense one might be trapped inside a walled castle with radiated zombie animals and sundry carcasses for company.




Inside the building, 10 flights of footstep echoing institutional stone stairs and through a heavy pair of dog-legged curtains brings you into a blacked out timber floored loft space commandeered by Phlegm and Robots. The door staff offer you hand held torches on the way in, health and safety obviously forbids that you should blunder around in the dark and bump your head.

Three coarse built but imaginatively fabricated wooden man-robots spread arms and link hands to tower over the cautiously stepping observers. A Phleg wall painting with an added out-of-scale 3D townscape emits eerie and un-nerving rings and ticks. The town appears to be carried of the back of a Phlegm figure who appears to be cradling a prismatic multi-faceted abstract geometric cloud in his hands. The work of both artists combines in a sinister and yet satisfyingly threatening way. The Robots have more than just a touch of the wickerman about them and the scrawny hooded Phlegm figure looks like a fugitive from a post apocalyptic mutant zone.




Neither handheld cameras nor flash photography could convey anything like the mood of this creepy dark installation, so no photos, sorry.

Trying to feel your away around this without the torch is recommended, enjoyment and wonder grows as eyes get accustomed to the dark and in the meantime, enjoy the fun of bumping into other timidly tip-toeing creatures. More art experiences should provide this kind of accidental tactile encounter.



A note on practicalities, the flyer talks of 4 nights of art, bands and such and apparently you’ll get stiffed with a cover charge in the evenings. It’s not clear if the place is open for free viewing before the ents start. Perhaps email them to enquire because it’s a bloody long way to venture from civilised parts.

ROA

Pure Evil Gallery
London
8 April – 2 May

all photos: nolionsinengland

Autumn last year, London’s walls (and a concertina door) turned into one of the largest scale bestiaries possible and those of us who had been watching the flickr photos of Belgan street art documenter Kreibel knew the moment eagerly awaited for over a year had come. Roa was in town.


Curtain Rd, London


Epic in scale and tackling manifestly damn difficult surfaces to paint, Roa has risen swiftly from painting in derelict building in Belgium to become highly prized in any decent street art collector’s portfolio.


East end, London


His first London solo show has just landed at the Pure Evil gallery in London. The work consists of paintings made directly onto the gallery walls coupled with large pieces on scavenged metal.




In the gallery Roa remains true to his core themes out on the streets – black and white creatures done in either figurative or cross-section. Most of the metal works have had a previous life as a clothes locker door, such as you might find at work, at school or in the changing room. Being locker doors they come hinged ready open and close and been keen on a bit of the lenticular image which looks different depending upon the viewing angle (like those moving pictures on the front covers of books from your childhood), Roa sets up most of the art to be played with with different images being achieved by opening and closing the doors.




Most of the two-way pieces flip between surface fur and anatomical innards. You could have hours of fun selecting different combinations of opened and closed doors to skirt around the old image enuii.




Taken as a whole you might see the whole of nature’s life cycle present in the show, right from conception done as a Beatrix Potteresque piece of squirrel lovin’. Roa has allowed a little bit of ambiguity to soften the rodent porn, are we looking at the inner thigh of the rear squirrel’s right leg in which case oh how cute, two squirrels next to eachother, or is it the outer left thigh of some nubile young squirrel-ette in which case the grinning and gimlet eyed rear squirrel should be allowed to get on with his work un-disturbed.




Therein lies the puzzle with Roa’s work, we are inclined to read human emotions and predicaments into the faces and postures of the various animals. It is fairly ridiculous to imagine we can interpret the equivalent “turning Japanese” look of a squirrel on his money strokes, never mind expecting Roa to be painting from intimate knowledge. Yet that’s exactly what we can’t avoid doing. Every Roa piece is squinted at to determine the basics, alive or dead? Hungry and feral or fully fed and bloated? The two horses on the wall in the gallery basement could be piled up spoils of an equine hunt, or two lazy domesticated nags crashed out after a feed.

After the animal world’s equivalent of wining, dining, jiggy-jiggy and a cigarette, the next stage revealed on found metal assemblage is the embryo gestation.





Some of Roa’s best outdoor pieces have been executed in dank roofless warehouses and ancient brick monoliths, the forgotten spaces surrendered by man back to the elements. Distress and dilapidation is part of the furniture at Pure Evil gallery so the basement is the perfect location for Roa to replicate the sense of nature triumph in the return to decaying beauty.


Brick Lane (ish)


Roa has turned the experience of entering Pure Evil’s cellar into a grim descent to a bizarre and unclean abattoir. Birds and rabbits hang from their legs possibly suggesting, at least in the case of the rabbit, the victim of a hunt being hung out to cure though the birds make you wonder if there is some ritualistic voodoo or occult significance.




Roa’s work might be described as representing the triumph of animals reclaiming the urban landscape though several of the pieces lead you to suspect some of the critters have come a cropper colliding with man the hunter. The basement installations look a bit like someone has gone a bit mad with the chloroform on Monochrome Farm.





Roa’s pallete is ideal for creating the sense of nature becoming grease-coated with the grime found in man’s no longer wanted former industrial era buildings. He teases our imagination with the alive/dead happy/sad un-resolved ambiguity and depends upon us to anthropomorphologize the creatures to give them their charm. Very little of the stuff displayed on metal is going to fit happily over the fireplace in the average home but curiously there are some conventional sized drawings displayed on the Pure Evil website.




Sadly, despite the beauty of the work and the un-paralleled marriage between derelict work and derelict location it has actually proved possible to make a fist of capturing the images, Graffoto commends you to Romanywg’s Roa photos which bring all his skills at photographing shit-holes into the gallery and Ian Wallkandy who just can’t take photos that don’t rock.


post script

Just as Graffoto was about to hit the upload button, we came across a couple of fresh ROA outdoor rooftop pieces. The roof position looks great, the animals are superbly rendered, the location is iconic but in the case of the full bird the sense of marginalisation and squalor is defeated by the presence of a huge commercial banner making the location as spoilt and derelict as an Ikea showroom.




And the position of the fresh TEK 13 otp portrait which went up the same weekend as the ROA show opens conflicts horribly with the idea that ROA animals are reclaiming a man-free zone. Oh dear.