Gallery Everywhere

“I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.” — Jean-Michel Basquiat

Look at a city wall. Layers of posters, old and new, edges curling, rain-stained, half-torn. Stickers accumulating like barnacles. A mural — someone’s careful work — now tagged over, tagged again, the tags themselves fading under newer marks. Text everywhere: names, slogans, declarations, jokes, warnings. Spray paint over wheat paste over paint over concrete. This is a palimpsest. A manuscript written, scraped, written again. Except no one scrapes here. They just keep adding. Layer buries layer. Yesterday’s statement becomes today’s background texture. Most people call this a mess. Vandalism. Something to clean up, paint over, regulate away.

I call it a gallery. And it’s always been one of my favourite ones. Not a gallery with white walls and good lighting. Not one where work is selected and explained. There are no titles. No prices. This is something else: an exhibition that lives and breathes. Evolves under thousands of names and constantly regenerates its skin. Weather strips away a poster from the dermis, revealing ghost images beneath. New tags claim territory over faded ones.

Someone paints a slogan over fresh paint. Over that slogan, someone else pastes a face. The slogan bleeds through it anyway. The effect catches. But doesn’t stay for long. On the ever-changing surface, new exhibitions come and go. A magnificent shapeshifter lives on the streets. Branded “destruction,” yet it stands in creation, in the raw artistic instinct — the need to make.

The street wall doesn’t need to be looked at. But it can be an ambush for the eyes. Most people hurry past. And yet — how captivating this chaos becomes when you do let it catch you. When you do pause. How much is happening on weathered electrical boxes? How many pictures sat on the scarred fence panels? Concrete pillars are tagged so many times that the surface gains topographic weight. Look at them for a while — and they will take you places. Corner after corner, a collision of countless stories, countless voices. Unplanned compositions with mixed energy. Intentional disruption and accidental harmony. Urban wilderness — growing over, made of patterns, constant change. An expedition through the known, unknown and felt, when you get into these walls.

Basquiat understood this rebellious soul  — how crossed words push to the front, and obscured images get louder — and he let it into the galleries. But it’s the streets where it has always lived.

Art, whenever it has a chance, escapes the boundaries and finds its way onto the city’s raw skin. It always has – take a look at the walls of the ruins in Pompeii. Or even further in time, to those caves full of animal and human silhouettes, where arrows froze in a forever flight to reach a mammoth. The art paints the walls wherever people live. And as it was. It always will (or so I hope). The question isn’t whether society as a whole agrees that this is “art”. The question is whether you see that it is art indeed. Uncomfortably uncontrolled, living art. In one of its wildest forms.

My collection of street art photos is a few terabytes in size. I tried to choose favourites, and couldn’t — selecting a few felt like a betrayal of the rest. So what you see here are randomly uploaded examples — the last batch from my phone. This gallery, that way, feels right. It shows street art in a mix as random as the process of discovering it in real life is.