What happens to graffiti when it’s hung inside a gallery and sold, besides losing a great deal of its cool? Is it fine art, and is it good art? An exhibit at one elegant Lower East Side Gallery gathers saleable pieces from several prominent street artists. Most of the pieces look like they’re samples – smaller segments cut out from works the artist might have completed on the side of a building somewhere. They feel unnaturally reigned in, like zoo animals, drained of their natural elan.
Only the pieces by Ben Eine sit comfortably within the gallery. This English artist stencils letters across buildings, and is best-known for painting the entire alphabet on storefronts along Middlesex Street in London. Like Shepard Fairey, his work is linked to Barack Obama: Prime Minister David Cameron presented Obama with an Eine canvas on a state visit. And, like Shepard Fairey, Eine is a skillful graphic designer. His work relies less on scale, site and bravado for its power – as so much street art does – than on composition and color. There’s a strong tension between figure an field in his paintings; he doesn’t like empty space, and inflates letters to fill the void. The lettering styles he uses resemble nineteenth-century type faces, so that, both in process and feeling, his stencils feel more mechanical than free-form. And his texts are becoming increasingly complicated, especially when he stencils streams of letters. He’s not writing poetry, not yet, but his format slows the act of reading, so that one stops and thinks rather than taking in the words all at once, seamlessly and mindlessly, as happens with so much advertising, signage and media. Eine's letters have a bracing physicality that alerts us to how powerful and subversive text can be. Sentences are always written for us with a reason.
