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Graphics.com Philter Phrenzy 12
You can enter the Phrenzy by downloading images from the Textura book and using them in your own composition, with a chance to win Mediabistro On Demand video training subscriptions and copies of the book. Details are available in the Phrenzy gallery. |
When did you first begin to think about Valencia’s need for
or interest in graffiti? What aspects of your personal life or of
social life in Valencia influenced you in your decision to take
up graffiti?
I started painting on the street in 1997. Among
my group of friends, there were a couple who had
already spent some time painting and their stories enticed
me. I started doing tags with a marker and some
pieces whenever we came across paint, which wasn’t
that often. In time, my interest in graffiti grew and
I started to see the street as a playing field in which
there existed greater freedom than compared to the
common perception. I left letters behind and started
to try out different techniques and formats and made
the city into a big workshop for my experiments.
Another wall is possible..., ESCIF 2009, Velluters
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How do you understand your graffiti’s relation to its
context? How much do you take the environment into consideration
(the street, wall, plaza, or neighborhood) when you
design a piece? In a more general and sociopolitical sense, do
you think that graffiti is a viable tactic for engaging the public
sphere?
Of course graffiti is a viable tactic for engaging the
public sphere. I see graffiti as a necessary symptom
of life in contemporary cities. A painted wall represents
a way of using the city that is not thought about
socially (though it becomes more so every day). It
seems very interesting to me that people that live in
a city do not settle for using it according to imposed
rules; they invent new ways of utilizing it. It seems of
equal validity to me to paint a wall, to put on a party
in a plaza or to organize a brunch on a rotunda. There
exists a collective social ethic that makes us understand
a tag on a dumpster as a sign of vandalism while a McDonalds stuck in the historical center of the city
is seen as a sign of progress.
As far as my work is concerned, I don’t only understand
it as graffiti. It might be closer to Mexican
mural painting or to contemporary illustration, even
though I am aware that it is a format that makes the
graffiti movement its point of departure. I like to
reflect on the spaces where I insert my paintings and
believe that this is an essential aspect of my work. I
prefer to use the context, to confront it, like most of
the paintings you see on the street seem to do. When
I get in front of a wall, I never have the final result
clearly in mind. Sometimes I start with an idea that I
previously had outlined in my sketchbook, and others
I just attempt to discover how to establish a relationship
with a space.
Overgroun, ESCIF 2009, Velluters
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In relation to other visual genres, especially pictorial or
audiovisual ones, or to comics, do you think that there is some
link or interaction between them and the way you conceive of
graffiti? And with respect to the notion and institution of art,
do you see that there is more of a dialog, a conflict, or both at
the same time?
If I had to relate graffiti with other artistic disciplines,
I’d link it, without a doubt, to the art of
action, performance. I fundamentally oppose thinking
of graffiti as an illustrative technique, and that’s
why I think of my work (as ESCIF) as far removed
from the principles of graffiti. Graffiti isn’t spray
painting an abandoned wall. Graffiti is much more
than this, even though to the institutional system it
is not recognized as such.
The art world has spent years trying to integrate the
graffiti movement. In spite of the many accolades that
it has received, I don’t think that it has been successfully
absorbed, and I would hazard to say that it
never will be. What gets put in museums, galleries,
magazines and press releases is not graffiti. Graffiti
as a concept implies transgression of “public” space,
and because of this its institutional adaptation ceases
to have value. What makes graffiti graffiti is not its
aesthetic qualities, nor the distress under which it
was executed. What transforms graffiti into graffiti
is precisely the conditions under which its engagement
is made. A graffiti writer can exhibit his work in museums and galleries, but this does not transform
his work into graffiti. Graffiti is on the street, in its
natural condition, where it will die.
Old bakery’s window, ESCIF 2009, Velluters
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What is the function of a tag in your graffiti? How or why
do you consider it necessary? Wouldn’t it perhaps be preferable
to remain anonymous, like the artists of some of the wall
paintings in the city?
I don’t sign everything I do, but I do sign most of my
projects. I try to use tags more as a graphic element
and to think about them as aspects of the composition
of my paintings.
On one hand, I see signatures as a question of ego, as
a reaffirmation of one’s self, a sort of I am here and a
look what I know how to do. This is not a stance that
I am very comfortable in, but I have to recognize that
I still have not managed to get myself out of it. I’m
working on it!
On the other hand I see tags as a sign of identity, as a
stamp that allows the relation of different interventions
and builds a broader discourse. Once the style
of the graffiti is more recognizable, tags cease to have
this meaning.
ESCIF 2009, Subida del Toledano, La Seu |
What could be called the identifying marks of your personal
style, if we consider it like visual poetry?
My work begins, on the whole, with experience and
personal reflections. Every wall I paint makes up a
part of a personal diary that is charged with recognizable
images. Over the past couple of years I have
tried to avoid abusing technique and to give a bigger
part to the concept. It’s my goal for style to be a natural
consequence of what I’m trying to say. I would like
to think that what matters in my paintings is not so
much their form as what they talk about. Taking the
personal as my point of departure, I attempt to make
use of a language open to multiple readings. Every
now and then I have a problem with my work and I
get tired of myself. At those times I try to move away
from the way I do things, and to find new languages.
I want to see life as a journey of constant investigation
where there is no end, as a process of eternal learning
in which every step puts the past in doubt.
ESCIF 2008, Calle la Sangre
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ESCIF 2008, Calle la Sangre
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