Aris

Description

Aris is a quiet master of urban painting. Anyone who occasionally glances at freight trains may well have seen one or two of his works without even knowing his name. Hailing from Tuscany in Italy, the artist creates unusual, dreamlike images on these drab industrial vehicles, using flowing, sometimes overlapping patches of colour. Building on a deep background in graffiti, he discovered the tools of classical mural painting and now works with brushes and paint rollers, mostly painting without authorisation on the metal surfaces of freight trains. Whether monochrome or multicoloured, his silhouette-like works contrast with the background, which is sometimes shiny and metallic, sometimes dull or rusty-brown. Early on in his career, Aris abandoned the signature lettering – usually the central motif of conventional ‘writing’ – and created images whose appearance was reminiscent of semi-figurative variants of modernist painting. Building on this approach – which was already revolutionary in the context of conventional graffiti – he developed his own visual language, situated between figuration and abstraction, two central yet normally distinct characteristics of alternative graffiti, through characteristic simplification and precision in his choice of colours and technique. Aris painstakingly paints sharply defined textures onto the exterior walls of railway carriages and industrial ruins, where they unfold into fantastical, fragile forms. At times, he also transfers these onto small-format works on paper or large-scale wall installations.