Postgraffiti came out of the confluence of academic art with graffiti and other forms of popular culture. Postgraffiti artists propagate graphic pieces of their identity in public spaces but, as opposed to graffiti writers, they don’t compete for the respect of their peers, and don’t make use of a particular code. They address the general public using images everyone can understand.
Most postgraffiti artists are academically trained. Their way of occupying public surfaces is often much more respectful than that of graffiti writers. Among the diverse materials used by postgraffiti artists, stickers, posters and stencils are the most common. These techniques, taken from punk and skate cultures, enable fast, discreet and effective actions.
Although the earliest cases date from the sixties, the first postgraffiti wave took place in the early eighties, and had its most visible artist in Keith Haring. After almost dissapearing during the nineties, since the turn of the century the current has reemerged, stronger than ever.
While each piece of postgraffiti can be enjoyed for its formal values and for the subtleness of the way it has been located,* the main pleasure emerges from the repeated encounter with the pieces, when the viewer is engaged in the artist’s game. A complicity emerges then between the artist an the viewer, and between the viewer and the rest of the audience.
There are two main currents in postgraffiti. Iconic postgraffiti focuses on the repetition of a particular image, which can be always identical, like Shepard Fairey’s icon face, or vary somewhat, like Eltono’s paintings or Dan Witz’s hummingbirds. Narrative postgraffiti does not repeat an image, instead, it offers always new contents, although unified by a characteristic style, as is the case of Swoon or Banksy. Both approaches let the viewer identify each piece as part of a whole, the central component of the postgraffiti mechanism.
* We call location to the process by which the artist chooses a spot and adapts his methodology, as well as the content and form of his work, to it.
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Eltono, Buenos Aires, 2007.
Invader, Bern, 2000.
Blu, San José, Costa Rica, 2007.
Swoon, Berlin, 2008. Photograph watz.