Blu - Making Graffiti Come Alive...

One of the things I dislike about the art world, is how it likes to take the art of the proletariat (yep, 4 years of art school got me that $10 word), and try to justify it by bringing it into the "Gallery." I witnessed this first hand while I was in school, where the "real" art that was graffiti, was being co-opted by small galleries, in the form of group shows featuring both lesser known and well known graffiti artist. Basically these shows would bring it all under one roof, make it a comodity, and sell it.

I always found this stupid, since graffiti's relevance was that it was on the street. It didn't need a nod from the establishment to validate its existence. I have always seen it as folk art, and thought it should not abide by the norms or etiquette of the capital "A" art world. If anything, the graffiti movement was due for an evolution (revolution?) on the streets of the worlds cities, not reduced to canvases (!) or found garbage scraps that trivialize its impact.

Street Artist Blu evolves the medium with these amazingly crafted, painstaking, animations.

Muto by Blu

Blue playfully destroys the notions of fixed planes and borders. Even his animation is subversive, as it moves off the wall and over floors, sidewalks, and ceilings. The animation is, for lack of a better term, surreal. Yet it has a sort of fourth dimensional feel where images and subjects envelope each other only to pull themselves out of themselves. In writing this, I realize how much harder it is to describe this than to understand it by watching it. This gratifying to watch loop of animation like this, and I can only relate to it in description to a non-animation work like René Magritte's La condición humana (1933).

A nice thing about Blu's work is that it doesn't fall prey to pitfalls of what we think of as "graffiti." His line seems almost a bit awkward, like that of an untrained artist. Surely there are better draftsman out there, but it would never capture the soul, or originality that Blu's pieces posses. His line is his voice. His style is uniquely proprietary, free from the any noticeable influences from the street art/graffiti world. It's both raw and alive, and perhaps that's why they are not static pieces, but rather small fragments of a larger, bigger than life, work. To view Blu's work in it's completed form of painstaking animations is to witness someone who's mind and talent is just that - bigger than life.

Visit Blu's blog for more current projects.