Monday 3 January 2022

Street Art v. Graffiti starring Jim Vision

Should this Shoreditch Street Art Tours post start with an apology to the spraycan virtuoso Jim Vision? Perhaps.

Last night [31 Dec 2020, new Years Eve] we held a short notice online virtual ramble through some of the art that provided great food for thought on the Shoreditch Street Art Tour in 2021. With the benefit of being able to show slides from the past, we were able to look at the waxing and waning of Jim Vision’s Jerome St mural which concluded with the photograph shown at the top of this post mural taken 2 days earlier on 29th December. This is the story of that mural and it ends with the dramatic update based on what we found today!

The history starts in 2020 with a curved wall pretty heavily battered with graffiti of varying styles and levels of accomplishment. The artistic highlight on the wall was probably back in 2014 with a beautiful paste-up from the French street artist Ludo.

Wild! Featuring Noze, Lap406 Oct 2019
Wild! Featuring Noze, Lap406 Oct 2019


Ludo, 2014
Ludo, 2014


Forward to 2020 and Jim Vision secures consent to paint the wall with permission and has claimed the spot as his since, painting a couple of portraits as part of his admirable “Colourful Women” series. In the artist’s words this was “celebrating all women of colour with their vibrancy and strength, at the same time addressing an imbalance in the representation of women of colour on walls. This first dates from early Summer 2020.
Jim Vision, June 2020
Jim Vision, June 2020


The next portrait on this wall came complimented by a pod of killer whales. In this next early December 2020 photo we see the mural in great condition with 8 killer whales swimming through, to the right is a cluster of illuminations and the background is an abstract veil of almost luminous vertical streaks.
Jim Vision, 2nd Dec 2020
Jim Vision, 2nd Dec 2020


Just a few days later the negative spaces in the margins have been targeted with graffiti, including sundry tags and a nice piece by Lap in the background:
Jim Vision, lap406 , 22nd Dec 2020
Jim Vision, lap406 , 22nd Dec 2020


Things are relatively unchanged by July 2021, a throw has gone over the cluster of lights to the right, a couple of tags and Lap in the background appears to have been painted out. Still the augmentations are occurring away from the main subject:

Jim Vision July 2021
Jim Vision July 2021


By October there is fascinating development in the artistic interactions taking place on this wall, Jim Vision covers up new tags with the creative and playful expedient of adding Orcas where the tags were. Now the pod has grown to 20 killer whales and something a bit albino, or perhaps a 21st whale with only its white parts turned to us:
Jim Vision Oct 2021
Jim Vision Oct 2021


Halfway through December heavy tagging appears in quite aggressive spots at the centre of the portrait and a green tag close to the front of the face where the white whale was. Ours is not to cast judgement!
Jim Vision, tags, 19th Dec 2021
Jim Vision, tags, 19th Dec 2021


Then, on 29th Dec, a new killer whale appears to be likely to see in the New Year, its placaement jumping through the earring brings to mind the cruelty involved in keeping these beautiful beasts in captivity in sea life parks. This was the state of play at the conclusion of the timeseries presented in the “The Best Of Shoreditch Street Art Tours 2021” virtual tour last night (New Years Eve):
Jim Vision 29 Dec 2021
Jim Vision 29 Dec 2021


New Years Day, this morning, look what we found:

New Years Day 2021 Jim Vision with Slak & Cuso
Enigma


Gonna take a lot more whales!


All photos: Dave Stuart

Sunday 26 December 2021

What Graffoto saw in 2021

Well done 2021 for having the audacity to follow a totally weird year with an equally weird year, way to go! Although life was not “business as usual” the year did yield some wonderful street art with unexpected and inspired new forms of creativity and a re-evaluation of the significance of paste-ups. We are delighted once again to share some of the past year’s street art highlights and we are talking 4 real, none of that “curated from the internet” bollocks. For once there is even a couple of nominations for “straight in at number 1” personal favourites moments, the risk being that the day after posting I will change my mind for different number 1 favourite.
Fanakapan - anamorphism
Fanakapan anamorphism


So, how did the global pandemic continue to affect street art in 2021? Most obviously the number of street artists from foreign shores who came to visit London was almost none. So it was a great pleasure to welcome Stinkfish from Columbia, a regular visitor last spotted around these parts in 2017. A significant number of his favella child paste-ups appeared but this mural really showcased those graffiti based spraycan skills.
Stinkfish with Fat Cap Sprays
Stinkfish with Fat Cap Sprays


The main opportunities to see overseas artists in Shoreditch came through paste-up art exchanged by overseas mail between artists then pasted up in reciprocal “you here, me there” arrangements. NY artist City Kitty was quite visible in Shoreditch this year and he is what I describe as a “collaboration machine”. Citty Kity Lunge Box Neon Savage
City Kitty, Angry Elephant and Neon Savage collab


It was a real delight to find this basketball playing City Kitty collaboration with New York sticker legend Chris RWK aka Robots Will Kill, and just a couple of inches tall.

RWK & City Kitty
RWK City Kitty collab



Neon Savage neatly swerved locked down screenprinting facilities by improvising a hand finished screenprinting effect using images inkjet printed onto marker pen coloured paper earlier in the year. Then right on the very last weekend before we descended into an unofficial lockdown-for-all-purposes-except-opening-Treasury-coffers, Neon Savage papered Brick Lane with gorgeous halftone acrylic and screenprinted pasteups. Printing of this quality and beauty is the kind of cultural treasure street art delivers to those who seek.

Neon Savage
Neon Savage


Fat Cap Sprays channels neon in a different way with super cute renderings of popular cartoon characters, depending upon which cartoon character era you grew up in of course, I still haven’t seen Marine Boy! Fat Cap Sprays made a big impact in 2021, the growth of his social media following (stay off tik tok folks!) contains a message I am sure about the link between street art and “success”.

Fat Cap Sprays
Fat Cap Sprays


David Speed also continued to hammer out his phenomenal pink neon eye candy portraits. There is a point at which cats in street art suggest the "cute" card being played but in this case David claimed a spot perfectly framed in the bus stop glass, nice use of street architecture.

David Speed at the bus stop
David Speed vs bus shelter


Artistic spats conducted on walls are a constant delight but when David spotted a paid for spraypainted advert in his signature neon pink he really took it out in style, nice one!

Ed Sheeran advert
Ed Sheeran advert


David Speed vs Ed Sheeran
David Speed vs Ed Sheeran


Although Enigma is not new to our streets, this Japanese artist only came to my attention after his post lockdown return from Japan upon which he embarked on a prodigious outpouring of stunning murals styled as old school woodcuts. Almost as remarkable as his street art are his garms when painting, smartly attired in a beige raincoat he looks nothing like the stereotypical street artist you might imagine. This surreal sci-fi beetle is novel for its pinkish hue, Enigma's art is usually a distinctive creamy magnolia.

Enigma
Enigma


Dramatic light and shade and classical imagery came to London’s street art through the work of talented painter Alessandro Lioviero. The Southbank Undercroft location has hosted several Liovero works, my favourite being this beautiful painting of a contemporary bronze statue by young Ukrainian artist Maksym Haydar.

Alessandro Loviero
Alessandro Loviero


Alessandro often finds inspiration in the work of others, often sculptors, which moves him to provide his own painterly interpretation. A curious dynamic occurred when Loviero painted a detail of the Alexandre Cabanel’s Fallen Angel in response to Enigma’s rendition of a slightly larger detail just one week earlier on the same wall.

Alessandro Loviero
Alessandro Loviero


Enigma
Fallen Angel by Enigma


There is a lot to be said for anonymity as a contrast to the self-promotion which seems often to trump actual art as a street art motive. In the first part of the year reports came in from all over town about strange single line characters with half formed sentence morsels suggesting clues to the character’s mental state. Street artists and geeks alike were intrigued by the identity of the artist, questions asked went un-answered. I may have been much later than many smarter people but I only pierced the Why Reuben veil in November when some clues appeared drawing attention to the artist’s part in a group show. Self-promotion wins every time!

Why Reuben
Why Reuben


If potty sums up your taste in humour then “I farted in yoga” is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face and is seemingly an alias used by Why Reuben.

Why Reuben
Why Reuben/I Farted In Yoga


Ahead of the London International Paste-up Festival I did not anticipate what a successful event it would transpire to be and my reservations weren’t just concerned with the awkward status battle in the first half of the title. The open call event in early November brought art from all over the world and a lot from artists not seen before in Shoreditch.

The Beast wall
Various artists at London International Pasteup Festival


Rather than an “Oh wow” at any particular pieces of art my main take-away was a reminder and re-appraisal of the impact paste-ups had in the formative years of street art with the emergence of street artists from a non graffiti background with a preference for quicker means of getting up and less beholden to the spraycan, unlike those with a graffiti background who generally preferred stencils. Full write up HERE.

Various artists London International Pasteup Festival
Various artists London International Pasteup Festival


Someone else who doesn’t need to be anymore brilliant than he already is is ALO, he had a prolific year on the streets crowned of course by a major solo show at the Saatchi Gallery at the year end.

Banksy
ALO


ALO
ALO, feat his good friend Dmintn


The pandemic lockdowns really gave Airborne Mark an opportunity to ramp up his multi-angle multimedia painting and video game. Most people’s videos are a kind of “ooooooooohhh, look at me and my skills” whereas Airborne Mark’s premise is “This is an experiment and I don’t quite know if it’s going to work”, his videos are like art painting tutorials.  This year’s master spraypainting output included a number of signature origami creatures places on beautifully rendered strips of torn cardboard. It is well work tracking down the video of him explaining the complexities of painting something as mundane as a torn piece of cardboard and his video of his second attempt to paint origami birds inside a glass jar is genius. And having seen Mark paint quite a few times the videos are all the more impressive when you realise that its him on his lonesome doing the video, the commentary and the painting, not a video team in sight.

Airborne Mark work in progree
Airborne Mark work in progress


Airborne Mark Frog
Airborne Mark Frog


Dan Kitchener’s Bladerunner-esque rainy Tokyo night scenes morphed recently into an impressionist view of the same through a rain drenched window. On a small screen such as the one you are using right now, the eyeball resolves more clearly details like the cars in the image, there is no real substitute for seeing a painting like this in the flesh to appreciate its true life beauty.

Dan Kitchener
Dan Kitchener


Wrdsmth, the vowel eschewing scriptwriter, took the dramatic step of moving to London after years of charming us with his mixed media typewriter life affirming mottos on his frequent visits from Hollywood. Quickly settling into a highly creative run Wrdsmth demonstrated an expanded repertoire including a clever site specific piece as one of several contributions to the London International Paste-up Festival.

Wrdsmth
Wrdsmth


Wrdsmth
Wrdsmth (detail from above)


Covid didn’t feature as much in London’s street art in 2021 but Dr D still points the finger at the Coronavirus for being such a buzzkill.

Dr D
Dr D


Dr D is always going to bring political satire onto the streets, his pasteup conversion of a van into a prison transport van for the conservatives was bang on point for the shit show that developed around the UK’s Prime Minister.

Dr D
Dr D


We celebrate the innovative, the novel and the inventive and something which ticked multiple such boxes at the end of the year were Perspex living apartments set into walls (usually) by Brickflats. The purpose is to highlight how the outrageous cost of renting in London forces people to cram themselves into tiny boxes by squeezing modern looking perspex flats which take advantage of missing bricks in walls. Assisted by a fragment of a map I went on a good old fashioned street art treasure hunt and found that all his brickflats were still in situ, a testament to the solidity of their novel installation.  The second installation below is actually a replacement of a missing cobble so you are looking into the flat from above.

Brickflats
Brickflats


Brickflats
Brickflats


Perspicere also brought a totally different dimension to street art fusing string art with paste-ups in a way that so photorealistic it left you searching for the trick. Having seen Perspicere creating one live for a street jam I am willing to take an oath and state there is no artifice, the image is created entirely from the intersections of the threads, of which there is north of several miles.

Perspicere
Perspicere


Perspicere
Perspicere


In many conversations with old school graffiti heads the name Nylon comes up frequently as both a style innovator and a hardcore spot seeker. New Nylon art is always a blessing and the way each vase can be appear as a pair of tribal faces or as a single cubist face staring us out was particularly clever.

Nylon
Nylon


A Shoreditch street art year lacks vintage without Ace pasting up some exercises in screen printed iconography. It’s not just that his art really triggers the right retina receptors, it the sense of continuity that Ace represents, linking the current new wave of paste up artists back to the fumbling fathers of street art which is where Ace come from.

ACE
ACE


Ed Hicks’ tense, doom laden images channelled Victorian apocalypse painters. This 4 panel landscape is perhaps my single highlight of 2021, you have to pinch yourself to remember that this is done with spraypaint.

Ed Hicks
Ed Hicks


Remaining with the painterly theme, Only HMZ not only blurred the boundaries between street art and graffiti with his gothic masterpiece fills within his letters, he went on to do crazy panel installations which in the case of the one presented below is mind-blowing for being, I believe, installed without permission. The work in progress photo illustrates the letter form that lurks within the painting, or does the painting lurk within the letters?

Only
Only


Only
Only


There is a further conceptual dimension associated with this installation not apparent in this photo, the trio of lights at the top were solar powered and by some means also people sensing, at night as people walked under the lights each one wold light up in turn from left to right or right to left according to the direction the passer-by was taking. Perhaps next time it will play a tune!

Only
Only


An artist who has had a sensational year was Pablo Fiasco. Pablo sets the bar for stencil art in terms of technical complexity of technique and the art embodied in his concepts and ideas. Bearing in mind that one of the key attributes of a stencil is speedy repeatability, PF reuses components from a library of stencils assembled over the decades in different combinations yielding completely different images. Subjects broached in 2021 included rapper tributes, Brexit and a skateboarding ex Federal Reserve Chairman [update - Mrs Greenspan got in touch and said she didn't think the skateboarder was her Alan; Mrs Burroughs said she thought it was her William but they both struggled to tell them apart] but this Mute8 stencil is the piece de resistance, I don’t recall every seeing stencilism of such complexity before. The narrative starts top right and broadly speaking turns anti-clockwise. In a laboratory a subject is to receive a vaccination, the subject mutates, escapes then there is a chase which concludes underwater. Pablo was quite categorical that this theme of scientific mutation has been in his art for several years and it wasn’t his intention that this necessarily be read as a comment on covid vaccination.

Pablo Fiasco
Pablo Fiasco - Mute 8


With unauthorised exhibitions opening all over the globe and people taking advantage (I guess) of copyright loopholes to mint NFTs based on Banksy’s art it is easy to overlook that Banksy pulled off his best wave of actual street art since he did New York for 30 days in October 2013. East Anglia is just sufficiently close to London to be day trip viable so despite fairly poor location descriptions I was delighted to be able to locate 8 out of 10 new original and authenticated Banksy street pieces in August. At that time, even before Banksy’s authentication, it was not known that there were actually 10 pieces in the campaign. Since then they have suffered various indignities including being partially dismantled (3 kids in a boat), covered in perspex, buffed, added to or most unforgivably in the case of both “under the paving stone” and the Banksy tagged model stable, acquired for profitable so-called protection by the usual avaricious gallery owner. Although lacking any mind-blowing “bar just got set even higher” pieces, the collection displayed characteristic Banksy wit and audacity. Banksy
Banksy


On the whole most of the pieces were looking quite photogenic at the time of my visit and I somehow charmed the Model Village owners to allowing exclusive behind the scenes access to photograph the stable.

Banksy
Banksy


So 2021, to call you a year is perhaps generous but what you lacked in meaningful real world calendar months you compensated for with brilliant and inventive street art. Many thanks to all street artists who have provided so much pleasure in their artistic endeavours and we look forward to plenty of new, creative and exciting art in 2022.

All photos: Dave Stuart

Thursday 2 December 2021

Mr Cenz Rewind

J G Contemporary
45 Churchfield Rd, London W3 6AY
25 Nov - 9th Dec 2021


Graffiti writer and artist Mr Cenz spraypaints vibrant futurist females and photographing his street art portraits at night has given me immense satisfaction down the years.

Shoreditch 2019
Shoreditch 2019


Shoreditch 2019
Shoreditch 2019


Shoreditch 2021
Shoreditch 2021


Rewind is Mr Cenz’s first solo gallery outing since his much raved about exhibitions at the Pure Evil gallery some 8 years ago. The collection here includes canvasses of course but also has framed prints, pen and ink illustrations and a light box as well as some Augmented Reality wizardry.

tn_IMG_0784 copy Mr Cenz origins are unmistakeably in graff, evident in the spraycan techniques and stylisms employed in his portraits.

Meeting Of Styles 2014
Meeting Of Styles 2014


Mr Cenz Rewind
Mr Cenz Rewind


Mr Cenz has no fear of a bit of colour. Light spears in bars through his portraits; starbursts illuminate model’s skin and pinpricks of light dance like those 1970s fibre optic lights. Warm reds, yellows, oranges and purples abound.

Mr Cenz Rewind
Mr Cenz Rewind
Mr Cenz has constantly sought to push his art forward, evolving through the addition of portraits to his graff, then dropping the letter content and now, in his current show Rewind, to embracing the potential of digital technical to animate and illuminate these colours that have always made his painting so interesting and distinctive.

Don’t ask me to explain the tech, it’s something to do with Instagram. This is one of those things you don’t actually need to go to the exhibition to experience, though Mr Cenz and the gallerist would sure appreciate if you did. Display one of the following images on a screen, open Instagram on your phone, go to Mr Cenz’s profile, press the three stars thing just above his photos, click on his version of the image and then click the “try it” button at the bottom of the screen. Simples.

Mr Cenz You Cant Hide Your Love
Mr Cenz You Cant Hide Your Love


Mr Cenz Intrinsic Rhythym
Mr Cenz Intrinsic Rhythym


Mr Cenz Groove Thing
Mr Cenz Groove Thing


I do love something new, something novel and in Rewind, as well as the beautiful colours you expect with Mr Cenz his exploitation of the tech has certainly delivered the “whooahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” moment.

Mr Cenz Love Influx Mr Cenz Love Influx


tn_IMG_0785 copy

All photos: Dave Stuart