Los: graffiti, painting, landscape

Why did they eat the mountain? The faces of the presidents on Mount Rushmore. What are they made for? Let’s see how it turns out? Or leave your mark? to leave your mark. And since these people were the “founders” of this country, they gave them to make huge faces, and if you didn’t like it: damn you. When the “observation” was asked to start with the nose, eyes, etc. Did anyone let him? The aborigines may have been intoxicated by making faces on the mountain. Why did no one stop the “memo”? For me it is the same. And the mountain they drew was not theirs.

TLOK, Enfamy, Doug Bray, 2005.

a light Covers the entire metropolitan area of ​​Valencia. Airbrushes, markers, chalk, plastic paint, etching, and any substance is liable to become LUCE. There was a time when it was impossible to connect two streets without seeing your signature. LUCE’s graffiti is so versatile, it has gone through thousands of records: one of the most classic aesthetics in logo card (Signed) proofreading where the name is lost.

When LUCE started painting in the early 2000s, Valencia was teeming with graffiti. Work was hectic and there was a lot kits A prolific book. It was to go out into the street for someone to paint discovering new interventions, and to wander the roads meant visiting the works left the previous night. This is how a file looks like graffiti writer.

“I’ve been learning my visual memory for 10 years through spatial readings. I can see a signature, it might say a lot, but if you show me a picture of logo card I’ll probably take you to that place,” LUCE says.

The street becomes a space for intervention that every writer studies to see what possibilities it offers. Within this urban reading game, LUCE began to transfer his work to the use of templates, to typography games, and little by little his identity as a writer grew and gained new records.

“An important leap in my business has been the use of templates, which comes from the graphic expression of graffiti where templates have been completely cursed. For me, the leap has been to move from using templates in a world reluctant to use that tool.”

The fact that the classic classification of graffiti was left allowed the writer to begin a series of exercises in which letters became an idea from which to experiment with typography and plasticity. The symbols of urban painting have been preserved, but their production has become more complex. Parallel to his drawings, a more conceptual line of work was built, in which elements of the city, urban works and the experience of street living were grouped into performances or interventions in public space. In 2016, the Mislata Biennale invited LUCE to give an intervention: the artist decided to “bleach” several balls on the balcony.

Both graffiti and LUCE’s more conceptual work are exercises in the interpretation of urban spaces. The artist becomes a catalyst and reproduces the entire gamut of gestures, actions or experiences that he encounters on the street.. As a result of that attentive look, LUCE discovered how workers placed posters on billboards They pulled the rubber band that fixed the folded poster to the floor. Using the collected rubber, he made a sculpture, something that, when its history is revealed, speaks to the small, cliched gestures that build and bring a city to life.

The poetics of LUCE is in constant dialogue with the landscape that passes through, inhabiting and interfering. The artist is interested in understanding the space in order to intervene in it: “Putting something in a white space limits me, I have always been associated with certain spaces. I find it difficult to build from scratch. I used to be associated with the city, there is something in my small production to do with that environment“.

At that point, his work transformed one of the primary symbols of graffiti: the vision. After years of exposure and bombardment, LUCE graphics are increasingly searching for hidden, hidden and secret spaces. Change the places the city has made invisible, either because it is marginal, because of its poor functionality, or because of economic neglect. Although LUCE preserves most of the canonical graffiti work, it has been looking for that little by little back to the sock in which a great deal of vision gives way to the search for unseen spaces.

“Something very hidden hits the trio. Since adolescence, I’ve been striving to show up, it’s been years in Valencia if I do well. spot Attracted attention. but Graffiti has become huge and now there are a lot of people doing it splatter Crazy I think evolution is the search for the hidden location. I also have references in the world of graffiti like the Spire in Berlin. I learned from him to look for the farthest place. I also enjoy places more and it happens to me a lot to get into spaces and I have no need to make a graphic reflection that I was there.”

After years of painting in the street, getting down to the confines of the subway tunnels, and making constant drifts through the streets, there are still quite a few spaces to discover the city. At this point, an intimate relationship with the urban space is reached where all its dynamics are understood. The city becomes a place that provides you with all possible resources to continue your business. For some time now and after having a close relationship with her, LUCE has known where to find her materials. Urban society produces more than it consumes and cities are the accumulation of its surpluses. Currently, the artist produces large-format paintings from recycling discarded advertising canvas: “I enjoy more than working with the materials in which I invested time in acquiring those resources.”

One of the strengths of graffiti is that it is fully contextual and relational painting. The fact that one paints oneself on the street forces the artist to be in a material and legal situation in another way, more attentive to his surroundings. From this context, LUCE has built a work in which subtle gestures of everyday life in the city are preserved and assembled.