Is the Writing Still on the Wall for Graffiti?

Is the Writing Still on the Wall for Graffiti?

Unless you live in Singapore, graffiti is pretty much a common fact of life. On fences, on walls, and even sometimes, on cars and animals. It's a form of art, although not that many of us will appreciate it. It is also a form of communication – an expression of both good and bad.

For most of us though, it is just ugly. It puts blemishes on public spaces, and has no sense of cohesion or relevance to our everyday lives.

That’s why I love initiatives that bring graffiti to a new level – one of appreciable street art. In Malaysia, we have Ernest Zacharevic, who decorates our streets with amazing portraiture representing simple, every day life scenes. Just this morning, I came across yet another example of a talented artist, helping to clean up our world – this time in terms of legibility. French artist Mathieu Tremblin takes walls of existing ‘artwork’ and makes sense of them as text – translating if you will, the scrawls into legible words so that the everyday person can not only understand, but perhaps even appreciate. To me, this is making sense out of the non-sense, providing some structured semblance to the chaos, and in its own little way, making the graffiti a little more acceptable to society.

Check out his work in the post below.

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Guy Paints Over Ugly Graffiti Tags And Makes It Legible

Graffiti tags… A joy to a few and an eyesore to the rest. The tricky bit is that it’s almost impossible to fight it, and knowing that full well, French artist Mathieu Tremblin has come up with a rather unusual plan. Instead of just painting over them, he decided to rewrite them in legible letters.

After graduating from the university of fine arts, Tremblin began working with street art. From urban interventions to graffiti painting, the artist was exploring the street culture and figuring out how it works and what fuels people who take part in it.

That’s how he came up with Tag Clouds project: “Tag Clouds principle is to replace the all-over of graffiti calligraphy by readable translations like the clouds of keywords which can be found on the Internet,” Tremblin describes his project. “It shows the analogy between a physical tag and virtual tag, both in the form (tagged walls compositions look the same as tag clouds), and in substance (like keywords which are markers of net surfing, graffiti are markers of urban drifting)."

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Article link: 

https://www.demilked.com/painting-over-graffiti-removing-tags-street-art-mathieu-tremblin/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=DemilkedFB