by Ariadna Zierold
Sweden opened its wall to the Street-Art event No Limit for the second year 3-6th of September 2015. With about 10 new walls spreading across the city of Borås, the outdoor art event invited artists from around the world to participate in turning public spaces into an outdoor exhibition.
Borås decided that the event had to remain authentic to the spirit of this movement and therefore did not ask the artists for sketches in advance. Instead, it made sure to accommodate them by providing large walls as canvases for them to paint whatever they chose. This of course is a controversial issue as nobody knew what the artists would create.
The 11 artists that participated this year are: Curiot, Daleast, David Zinn, Dulk, Inti, Joe Iurato, Laurence Vallieres, Logan Hicks, Pichi&Avo, Robert Proch and Tristan Eaton.
1. Tristan Eaton
Born in Los Angeles in 1978, Tristan began pursuing street art as a teenager, painting everything from walls to billboards in the urban landscape wherever he lived, including London, Detroit and Brooklyn. After growing up on comic books, graffiti and skateboard culture, Tristan designed his first toy for Fisher Price at 18 years old and began working as an artist full-time. He has since become a driving force in the world of ‘Art Toys’, designing the Dunny and Munny figures for Kidrobot.
Shortly after studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Tristan founded Thunderdog Studios, of which he was the President and Creative Director for 10 years. Thunderdog Studios regularly designs and consults for clients such as Nike, Disney and Barack Obama on projects that span the globe across all mediums.
Painting on the streets of Boras, the Los-Angeles based artist quickly worked his way through this beautiful new piece which is entitled “Out Of Sight”. As usual with Tristan, he created some of his signature patchwork imagery which is featuring a myriad of different images and details.
2. Logan Hicks
Logan Hicks is a New York-based artist known for his photorealistic stenciled paintings. Studying at the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art in the early 1990s, Hicks cut his teeth as a successful screen printer, before being inspired to branch into stencils. Hicks was inspired move to California to align with the Low Brow movement of the 90s, and concentrate on his fine art stencil work. Hicks relocated to Brooklyn in 2007 to continue his fine art.
Called a painter with a photographer’s eye, Hicks’ work has largely focused on the perception of the environment, at times humanizing its architectural angles and structures, and at others using its vastness to explore self identity. With an old masters approach to lighting, Hicks sculpts ordinary architectural scenes into deeply metaphorical and contemplative imagery through stenciled aerosol. In recent years, the artist has delved further into his own metaphorical language, bringing in themes like water to create dream-like imagery that explores his own meditative contemplation on the world that surrounds us. Hicks has also translated a history of decorative and cultural patterns into his stencil pieces, furthering the obscured reality created by patterns by incorporating them into photorealist stencil.s To Hicks, patterns are an extension of light, hiding reality the same way trees cast shadows on the forest floor.
Hicks’ introspective imagery is pushed from sullen to vibrant to enigmatic, with his expert use of color and meticulous control of the spray can. Over the years, Hicks has developed his impeccable photorealistic style using stencils, sometimes using up to 15 layers of stencil to achieve this precision. Working from his own photographs, subjects are translated to multiple layers of stencils, brought to bold dimensionality by blending colors through aerosol.
3. Pichi&Avo
From Valencia- Spain, PichiAvo are one, fleeing from the self-centeredness of graffiti, united to create a single piece of work, two similar visions of the world are the result of their work, which is constantly evolving and taking them all around the world, like UK, Norway, Greece, Portugal, EEUU… Stroke, signatures, collage… explosions of colors that invade the subconscious, precipitated by the personal rant of their artistic ideology and an aesthetic widely argued in the texts of Walter Benjamin.
Pichi Avo recite a conceptually urban poetry, born from the artistic formalism of the street, using any artistic inventiveness that can be applied, transferring fragments of a wall to the canvas and vice versa in a personal version, viewers can expect a heady concoction of ancient and modern that remixes classics from art’s illustrious history and rewrites the rulebook in the process.
Painting on the streets of Boras, the Spanish street art duo quickly worked their way through this trademark artwork showing several greek inspired statues against a graffiti background that really pops.
4. DALeast
Active in the burgeoning Chinese graffiti scene since 2004, Daleast was a founding member of the Wuhan-based artist project group Chirp, one of the earliest groups in China to merge public art and graffiti. He studied sculpture at the Institute of Fine Arts in his hometown, but quit the year before completing his degree after disagreeing with the school’s teaching methods. Moving to Beijing in 2009, Daleast began to focus more on what he sees as a public art rather than strictly graffiti practice, starting at this point to also produce fine art work for a more gallery based context.
Daleast’s current practice, his three-dimensional, wire-like artworks, can be seen as a natural fusion of his illicit and institutional educations. Half-robotic and half-biotic, the contorted, large-scale, sculpturesque forms he produces reveal what lies beneath the surface, highlighting the foundational frameworks that hold the physical world together: He evokes a fantasy in which the natural and the synthetic become one, resulting in mongrel creatures that illustrate the beauty rather than the horror that can spring from such a union.
Putting his art into public space so as to share his “experience and emotion with people,” not to tell them “about right or wrong,” Daleast thus attempts to confront the viewer on conceptual as well as spectacular levels, a pictorial synthesis of a half-mechanized, half-organic world.
5. Joe Iurato
He uses layers of hand cut paper and spray paint to create texture and form – a modern adaptation of an old-fashioned printing process. His art is nothing more than the exploration and documentation of personal experiences. These are his stories and how he choose to tell them. The site-specific placements of the pieces often utilize the urban environment to complete their narratives.
6. Dulk
Dulk is a hungry and insatiable all terrain illustrator. Urban art, illustration and graphic design are his fields, his twisted imagination does the rest.
He has shown his work all over the world in walls as same as exhibitions. His style is an explosive combination of influences like the surrealism or the obsessive detail brushwork of Flemish painting, all mixed with a bizarre, burlesque and affectionate touch that makes it compact, direct and very honest.
Antonio enjoys creating compositions with lot of characters and stories based on his own dreams and everyday events, mixing fact and fiction.
Stay tuned for Pt. 2.
All images via No Limit.