Pure Evil Brighton Solo Show

Ink-d Gallery, Brighton
4 Jul - 2 Aug 08


Un-diluted, 100% concentrated, fully refined malevolence filled the sea air surrounding the Ink-d Gallery in Brighton. This phenomenon has a sweet herbal scent and it manifests in the form of Pure Evil. The master of the double bluff shields his evil bunny alter-ego behind a veneer of decency which deceived a national press "used-to-think-street-art-was-shite-but-now-its-value-has-rocketed-I-get-it" art ponce who saw only the “sweet and smiley bloke, greying at the temples...”; all the better for clandestine manic outbursts of aerosol tourettes and paste-up madness on the streets.

 
Evil Bunny is a very real freeform wicked Oryctolagus cuniculus, its piercing eyes and sharp fangs threaten disorder, malice and sinister fun from many a wall.






So long as there is an evil bunny on a wall in Shoreditch, anarchistic artisans will find the Pure Evil gallery in Leonard Street a lighting rod for situationist fun, general chaos and the occasional bottle of Vedett beer. Prosecution has never struggled with lack of evidence of Pure Evil’s street credentials.




Pure Evil's Pearly Kings and Queens admire Swoon filigree. Jef Aerosol and The Krah lurk with intent



Pure Evil testifies for East London’s mandatory euthanasia program
 

And the Leonard Street Gallery doesn’t exactly softly whisper “Pure Evil” in grey micro lettering on a small white card.



 
Deep in the slimy dark vaults where Pure Evil fabricates his latest apocalyptic vision, the machinery has been busy exploring fresh craft techniques to propagate the message, honing the cutting edge sharpness of the artwork and improving quality control!

In autumn last year the evil bunny morphed into a neon light on canvas. Prospects for world domination increased dramatically when the neon evil bunny was put into a reflecting Perspex box, now the latest version of the infinite neon bunny comes brighter, in various colours and thankfully, better manufactured - distracting electric cables are banished to a hidden recess within the box which also improves the hanging.




That pretty awful last photo fails to capture an interesting feature of two of the show’s infinite neon bunnies; due to slight concavity of the outer surface of the box (or was it convexity of the back surface) the multiple reflections get bigger and bigger as the images recede into the distance, the earlier versions had bunnies which got smaller.

The Evil Bunny has chosen to spread its caustic influence by annexing the supposedly harmless motif of a butterflies stencilled on canvas, lending it the acidic fluorescent light outline while Pure Evil is subliminally cut into the mottled variegations on the butterfly wings.


 

This Pure Evil collection provides a first outing for images stencilled or silkscreen printed onto glass which is then painted behind to give a glossy fluorescent coloured or silver background, the stencilled image just leap off the pop art colours. Its like the images are stencilled onto ultra smooth polished coloured plastic and looks awesome.
 


 
Pure Evil hooked up with London’s pearly Kings and Queens earlier this year to produce a series of street paste ups and canvasses, emblazoned with Live East Die Young. Rather than repeat the simple stencil seen at Banksy’s Cans Festival a couple of months ago, Pure Evil has slapped the gorblimmeyluv kings and queens onto a glass with lurid pink background.




Pure Evil Bunny mission to add a bit of colour to walls the world over has been captured by blasting the CGI silver surfer off his board and carving a stencilled path through a canvas New York, spraying slogans and swear words down into the metroplolis as he goes.



Fresh from the Pure Evil crypt is the stencil on glass goya-esque apocalyptic vision of the Wild Thing leaving the war scene, winsomely titled “May God Have Mercy On My Enemies... Because I Won’t”.





Evil Bunny can’t even leave its friends in the Pure Evil show alone, well someone must be blamed for the Wild Thing on glass that appears to have an unfortunate case of spray paint diarrhoea.



Pure Evil’s cross-fertilises his work to produce bastard offspring of earlier pieces, such as the latex bunny woman, in a gimp mask natch, who now has silver buttons nicked from the pearly Kings and Queens.



Panda-ing (boom boom) to the edtioned print market, Pure Evil has produced the silk screened “Tagger Scum”.


"Tagger Scum"

Pure Evil can at times give the impression of having too many ideas rushed onto gallery walls but this show, notwithstanding the loose bowelled Wild Thing, has a polish to both content and product which would surprise anyone who hadn’t seen much Pure Evil beyond the Pictures On Walls panda prints.

Pure Evil’s show is too strong to be contained within the mere physical confines of gallery walls, psychadelic glows flood out under the doors, through the windows and quite possibly up the chimnies too. This show is a feast for the eyes and but beware, it may strike terror into your soul.

These and more pictures from the show can be seen here

www.ink-d.co.uk

It's All Greek To Me: Athens Pt 1

Over many years as London’s ambassador to Athen’s tavernas and bars, I have had the pleasure of observing quite a large amount of graffti, regrettably nearly always from the windows of taxis (when Athens taxis are moving it’s best to keep your eyes closed, thankfully they also spend a lot of time stationary). On my most recent visit at the beginning of June (08) I managed to carve out a few hours from my lotus eating schedule to jump on the back of a Vespa driven by my friend Alex-The-Greek and tour around creating havoc on the streets (and pavements) and photograph Greek graff.


unknown – indecipherable tag

Aided by an Athens map embellished by a bunch of loose fluid tentacle strokes courtesy of The Krah, it proved easy to locate several deep warrens of single track back streets, alley ways and bazaars crammed full of spray work.



Athens is sliced, diced and surrounded by a network of pedestrian-hostile highways, the deep walls holding back the embankments have proved an irresistible canvas for taggers and artists who generally need not fear passing foot traffic.


Captain Hook


I’d been seeing lots of swarms of evil grinning bees along most of these main routes, some of them even had psychedelic don’t mess with me colours.




Athens artist b. who has graced quite a few London walls over the past year or so but in his natural habitat, this is b.

b., Norjin

And these,

Hit, b.


b. and ?

And for good measure there is a lot more b. here

(where The Krah has helped with identification, that is 100% accurate; some of the attributions are my guess and may well be wrong – apologies in advance).

One artist whose stuff I have admired on flikr but never actually seen in real life is Joad. Her pieces proved to be a bit more elusive that I had hoped but the few I found were treasures.


Joad


Actually, I had come across a Joad last Autumn near the hotel I usually stay at, un-expectedly it was a plain but crisp block but look closely and the trademark whispy lines are present.


Joad, more here
ons in her comment - its a beauty:

Joad, Icnoc


The second installment of this Greek adventure will follow in a few days or so but if you can't wait or simply can't take any more words, then by all means just take a look at the pictures here.

Update: check out part II here

Cept Update

I knew it would be worth waiting a while to update on the lushness that is painted by Cept......actually, that's a complete lie, I didn't have a clue quite what was gonna happen in the last month and a bit around his usual Sclatter Street wall.

It had been in this guise below, fairly suitably untouched (or more to the point well maintained in between times) since a couple of days before Valentines Day this year

Then at the end of May it got an extremely fresh new update, I loved it, and took a lot of pics (funny that) but have since been asked by Cept not to show them. Seems he didnt like how it looked (o.k, so it may have needed to be finished a little more, but overall was a nice in yer face assault of colours and had a classic Cept/Lichtenstein girl character)

Again borrowing from the DC Comic / Lichtenstein comic book style Cept is now also famous for, in the version that now remains he then added the phrase "my mistakes were made for you" to this amazingly tight wall. The man couldn't make a mistake if he tried!

And to go a bloody long way in proving that point, in a style reminiscent of some of the updates on his site http://www.spradio.com/-1.html he has most recently painted the wall of the also excellent inside LoungeLover bar. Can control aplenty in action here as per usual, the lines and details can be identified without any form of tag or name thrown up...but what the hell, even his tag is the business so he did that anyways.

In fact, I am sure thats why Sclatter Street got painted out so quick.......it was 2 mil off centre.

Cept is also due to be at LoveBox (He's obviously feeling a whole lotta love lately) as he is releasing an exclusive print called "Love from Hackney" at the festival. It's an edition of 20 digital prints that will only be available from the festival, which happens this year on July 19th/20th in Victoria Park, Hackney.

Rule Of The Renegade

It’s a generally well known rule that graffiti taggers don’t go over eachother’s pieces unless the intent is a very public show of that charged notion of lack of Respect.

Frenchman C215 burst into the wider UK street-art consciousness with an array of sumptious portrait stencils in March this year and he was invited back by Banksy to be a major contributer to Cans Festival. His stencil art focusses on weather-beaten old men and women whose lined faces wear their experience of a life well lived, or young boys and girls from South American barrios he visits, or his daughter.


C215


C215


C215


Along comes ACE with a selection of fairly mundane paste ups, bombing the same turf around Hoxton and Shoreditch. Ace’s quality is patchy, some stuff is eyecatching and great whilst merely adding a cartoon character’s head or eyes to a photocopied photograph reduces the bulk of it to pretty average.


Ace


Ace

No problems for a while, until Ace decides to go over the recent C215 stuff.


Ace - compare this with the first photo at the top

The placement is aggressive; no defence on the grounds of C215’s stuff aging or fading can be sustained, the pieces were still fresh and un-tagged over. The evident difficulty of ACE’s paste-up location spoke of very deliberate going over. The effort and skill required to paste-up behind those tight bars without the paper wrinkling or sticking in folds speaks of intense focus on the process.

Ace has some previous in this area, going over a rather tasty but un-identified painted wave in Blackaller Street (Kozyndan? Theirs used a rolling bunny motif in the wave crest), see also Copyright (above, third photo from top), another victim of Ace’s indiscriminate dogging.


Unknown - After Hokusai


Ace

A guy with a street artist’s sense of integrity and honour, with a 6 year stretch served and a burning self righteousness is obviously going to take offence. So C215 took advantage of a return visit to London this week to very very publicly reck revenge on a pile of ACE stuff, laying down the law and up-holding his honour in the process.


C215 (also pictured - Cauty)


C215


C215

This is what happens on the streets. This one may prove to yet have legs.

Cut Up Collective

I haven't seen too much stuff from the Cut Up Collective, until now...... And boy was it worth the wait!


There is word via their own site ( www.cutupcollective.com ) about a month long event in the area, so hopefully I will spot loads more before it ends as they are simply amazing. The collective members select both billboard and bus stop posters and cut them down(sometimes huge sheets at a time) then they remake an entirely new image from the cut up pieces. Surely this choice is not made randomly as a huge amount of effort must go in to reconstituting them.



CutUp will take over the Seventeen gallery on Kingsland Road, transforming it into Grand Hotel Abyss, a makeshift studio for a month. Every night during the month, advertising posters from the surrounding area will be cut down, removed and taken into Grand Hotel Abyss, CutUp's temporary home. Here they will be reordered and prepared for their placement back into the spaces they came from.




To hopefully be continued !

Thieves Ladder

Installation show by Armsrock, Chris Stain and Poncho,
Black Rat Press, Rivington Street, London
12th June

Thieves and ladders are two words many might associate with graffiti and street art. Put them together and show them to a multi-national trio of street artists and the meaning transforms to the collaboration of people lifting each other up from the bottom of the shaft of economic, political, intellectual or social dysfunctionality .

Armsrock comes from Denmark via Bremmen and is a small and wiry bundle of energy. Exactly the kind of guy you'd imagine shinning up a drain pipe with a paint roller and some Dulux hanging off his back.


His previous visits left London with some original paste ups on walls and doors.




Armsrock

Chris Stains is a Queens, NY legend and is making his first visit to London, probably Poncho is too but the gallery wallah’s Spanish was even worse than Poncho’s English.

Armsrock's signature contribution to the installation occupies two ends of one wall and the whole of the back wall. If you prefer your art installations instantly accessible rather than deep and conceptual, then Armsrock provides the element which defines the whole installation, the key to comprehension, an enormous red lifeboat transporting a cargo of refugees. All lifeboats present a dual nature, a dichotomy between hope and despair, between salvation and desperation, anyone embarking into a lifeboat is doing so under threat imminent death yet the lifeboat is the last throw of the dice, possibly leading to safety or to doom.


Armsrock

Within the lifeboat a flotilla’s worth of boat people sail towards the promised land, an urban society which at first superficial glance appears built of orderly, stately architecture but closer scrutiny of this man made utopia-apparent reveal areas of dirtier city ghettos harbouring squalor, deceit, dirt, and despair. This paint on layered cardboard cityscape is a new departure for Armsrock.

Armsrock



Armsrock

Shanty town constructions, reinforced by a pallet built shack in the centre of this room rather than art deco apartment blocks are the reality awaiting this county's tired and huddled masses.


Poncho/Chris Stain

Even the gallery toilet door is integrated into the piece, urgent requirements to spend a penny can be critically delayed seeking this door which is disguised in the layered paper city, a bit like a library door disguised as a bookcase in some kind of scruffy stately pile.


Bathroom access by Armsrock (its there –honest)

Key themes explored by all three artists are the invisible boundaries between hope and desperation in a de-facto apartheid riddled segregated urban system. The features of the refuges may be caricatures but there is no pandering to any racial stereotype which would suggest Africans setting out from Morocco to Spain or Albanians crossing the Adriatic. They are symbolic of a universe of marginalised and oppressed, human beings with feelings, history, emotion but no voice.


Armsrock

Stain and Armsrock have constructed a universal metaphor for flight, desperation, salvation, but at the same time, our voyeuristic view is from the perspective of a more cynical civilisation, we are aware that the dream these people have been fed is illusory, the nirvana the media has force-fed them is fake, not everyone has a full mod-con house, not every girl shakes her hair like she lives in a silvikrin hairspray ad, rare is the happy family with contented wage-earner, beaming home-keeper and clean healthy smiling children. Armsrock sees an invisible barrier preventing these aspirants, the economic and political refugees from attaining their illusory goal.

Armsrock (subsequently installed in window)

It may be reasonable to ponder similarities between Armsrock’s craft and the weatherworn, gnarled faces of Swoon’s native Americans or her subway riding metropolitans, also though perhaps more remotely there might be some similarities to Elbow-Toe’s life size anguished and distorted humanity but Armsrock firmly believes the comparison is not to be taken too far. No further than the figurative style employed from time to time by all three. The derricks or coal pit wheel houses sting atop the city heaven-hell do however appear to resonate with the barrios/ghetto visions blended into the fabric of the clothing in some of Swoon's work.

Quite specifically, Armsrock rejects repetition; no woodcuts or linos capable of producing multiple images, every single piece whether on the street or here in the gallery has been produced as an original.

Armsrock frequently works life-size, and the crafting of the figures is exactly the same here in the gallery as he uses on the streets, brushed acrylic on paper, though in the gallery it is Japanese rice paper whereas on the streets it is any kind of newsprint or rough paper. Every one an original.


Armsrock


The theme of escape, transport and relocation is continued by Chris Stain through an enormous train profile painted on cardboard on another wall. The US railroad system has a much broader symbolism for migration than British Rail could ever sustain. Beyond the obvious freight and commuting functionality, the US system has been imbued with the romance associated with the railroad pioneering into the mid-west, and the romance of a hobo sub-culture. Also, for the past 20 years or so an sub-culture of train painting has developed among graffiti artists which involves ornate old skool tagging with an adjacent graff character, and its not un-usual for artists thousands of miles apart to admire and be inspired by the train graff as it travels north-south and east-west throughout the network.


Chris Stain/Armsrock

Stain has used this form, although he not conventionally a train tagger, to doff his cap in the direction of fellow NY street art legend Swoon with some bubble writing and a blonde bouffant smurfette. Niiiice.


Chris Stain (this graff was scruffed to simulate a well travelled carriage)

The first and most basic instincts of mankind relate to eating, shelter and sleeping, and using a pair of life size unlit shanty shacks Poncho has re-created the basic kind of shelter many Mexicans are forced to endure as they lever themselves up societies lower strata. These shacks contain many small scale Stain originals on wood and steel and many slogans, anyone using Crass slogans (among others) cannot be accused of political apathy.

Chris Stain

Apart from the shacks, in contrast to the energetic and informal installation pieces of Stain and Armsrock, Poncho has gone for a more structured and conventional approach in producing a series of stencilled images on board. The detail and sharpness of of the stencils, the texture in the image and the emotion are top class, whilst thematically they are as one with the rest of the piece, they look a bit out of place among the chaos. Not to complain, some of the complex images such as the gun belt Madonna treading on societies un-fortunates are stunning. But big.

Poncho



Poncho

As an end thought, no prints and no canvasses puts the BRP crew out there on a limb, doing this more or less for love, likewise the artists. This was a brave move following the patchiness of the Ellis/Swoon Canilao Heap Show installation and for mind and eye satisfaction it has paid off.

More pictures are in the flickr link in the signature below, it must be said that the lighting tonight made some of the pieces difficult to photograph or even see properly, BRP is set up for the most stunning illumination of wall mounted canvasses and prints but the gloomy lighting, whilst in keeping with the show theme still could have been brighter