All posts tagged: Surrealism

Mr. Barlo Embraces Surreal Experiments on Hong Kong’s SoHo Streets

Mr. Barlo Embraces Surreal Experiments on Hong Kong’s SoHo Streets

June 14, 2018

South of Hollywood Road in Hong Kong is often referred to as the SoHo of the city, steeped in neverending staircases that scale the pitched incline and pinched into back alleys full of skinny cats, fashionably urban youth, and a fair amount of homegrown organic graffiti and Street Art.

Mr. Barlo at work in Hong Kong (photo courtesy and © Mr. Barlo)

A home away from home for the Italian Mr. Barlo, who has explored his ideas on the streets here for four years or so, today we have examples of the creative range of ideas he is experimenting with in new wheatpastes and a recent mural (for HK Walls this spring).

“ ‘The Pet of the Archeologist’ – This is the last wall painted over the weekend for @hkwalls 2018. This is a concept born quite a while ago in Hong Kong for a wall in Hong Kong but never had the chance to be done properly. It also made me think that it has been ages since I painted a mural in the streets of this crazy city that I call home(-ish).”

Mr. Barlo. Hong Kong (photo courtesy and © Mr. Barlo)

All of these pieces are meant to be discovered – scattered as they are among the winding streets and backsides of increasingly chic boutiques, quirksome art galleries, and sleekly dark bars.

” ‘La città inquieta” (unresting city)’ – This is the first of a series that I am determined to push forward through 2018 – not necessarily limited to paste up. It is my first attempt to channel into an artwork the chaos under the veil of modernism, the naive optimism and the unspoken anxieties that this city has been feeding me since I decided to call it home,” he says.

Mr. Barlo. Hong Kong (photo courtesy and © Mr. Barlo)

“It is also the first attempt a pasting above ground – definitely not perfected yet,” he says of the undulating flag that is a metaphor for the anxiety and discomfort of changes percolating inside notions of modernism, and perhaps nationalism today.

Using the streets as a laboratory to test new ideas and techniques, Mr. Barlo is not worried that pieces may cause confusion, because whether it is surrealism or classical Western ideas of figurative beauty, all of it can be reappropriated, sliced into pieces, pulled apart and examined from within.

But whatever the implied or opaque meanings, watchers of Mr. Barlo will tell you that his technique is definitely progressing.

Mr. Barlo. Hong Kong (photo courtesy and © Mr. Barlo)

“These wheatpastes represent quite a new way of working for me, given the limits of paper as a medium and the higher risk of seeing work that still took hours to be made being taken down right away,” he says as he stretches to describe the experience of going out and hitting up walls as night with a friend or two with these new one-of-a-kind and often cryptically themed posters that have hidden meaning known mainly to him.

Mr. Barlo. Hong Kong (photo courtesy and © Mr. Barlo)

“It has been a very refreshing approach that has allowed me to work on pieces that are more focused on one specific subject while trying to still infuse character and a sense of mystery into the work.”

Mr. Barlo and “Sisyphus”. Hong Kong (photo courtesy and © Mr. Barlo)

“‘Sisyphus’ – aka your reward for walking all the way up on Aberdeen Street,” he says of this dung beetle. “This is the second attempt for this poster as the first was removed within 24h after I put it up, before I could even take a picture of it. Considering the title it was kind of hilarious.”

Mr. Barlo. Softcore. Hong Kong (photo courtesy and © Mr. Barlo)

” ‘Softcore’ – I hadn’t drawn human features for so long but I got caught again by the beauty of the volumes that only the human figure can express,” he says of this neoclassical beauty. “The spot is also so right for it, just outside Sai Ying Pun MTR (train station.”

Mr. Barlo. Hong Kong (photo courtesy and © Mr. Barlo)

“La Musa” (The Muse) byMr. Barlo. Hong Kong (photo courtesy and © Mr. Barlo)

“Amphora” by Mr. Barlo. Hong Kong (photo courtesy and © Mr. Barlo)

“Amphora” by Mr. Barlo. Hong Kong (photo courtesy and © Mr. Barlo)

Mr. Barlo. Hong Kong (photo courtesy and © Mr. Barlo)

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Holy Faile ! “Savage/Sacred Young Minds” at Brooklyn Museum

Holy Faile ! “Savage/Sacred Young Minds” at Brooklyn Museum

July 8, 2015 ,

FAILE may be a religious experience this summer at the Brooklyn Museum, but only one of the hallowed installations is called Temple. The seedier, more dimly lit venue will surely have the larger number of congregants by far, bless their sacred hearts.

Celebrating the duality and appropriation of words, slogans, and images has been the baliwick of the duo since they first began hitting Brooklyn streets at the turn of the century with their stencils and wheat-pastes on illegal spots and neglected spaces. In FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds, their new attention commanding/refracting exhibit organized by Sharon Matt Atkins at the Brooklyn Museum, these guys pour it on, compelling you into a complex panoply of possible re-imaginings of meaning that reference pop, pulp, myth, art history, 50s sci-fi, 60s advertising, comics, punk zines, consumer culture and their own pure artistic and branded fiction.

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FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

For fans of this collaboration between artists Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, Savage/Sacred is a joyride swerving through the visual vocabulary and terminology they’ve been emblazoning across walls, doorways, canvasses, stickers, sculptures, prayer wheels, wood blocks, paintings, prints, toys, and a museum façade in their steady ascendance from anonymous art school students and Street Artists to a highly collected top tier name in contemporary art.

Offering you a full immersion and opportunity for titillating interaction, this show provides an unambiguous sense of the industry that is backing the Faile fantasy. Throughout their work and your imagination and assumed role, you may be villain, distressed damsel, wolfman, fairey, vandal, wrestler, hot-rodder, madonna, whore, supplicant, avenger, surfing horse or simply an arcade hero who is whiling away windowless hours punching buttons, popping flippers and pumping Faile tokens into tantalizing art machines.

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FAILE. FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Central to the formative Faile story is an image of the teenage Patricks piecing together clues about the world in these dark dens of possibility and teenage angst, awash in fantasy, aggression, testosterone and communal alienation.

Miller talks about the arcade atmosphere with a certain reverence, “All through Middle School, especially on the weekends, you’d just get dropped off at the mall and be there all day. There is something about the idea of this being a somewhat sacred space as a teenager in arcades. They are sort of a “Candyland” – a magical space mixed with a little seediness. You had kind of a large age range in there. You could get in trouble if you wanted but through the video games you could live out these crazy fantasy experiences. Historically arcades have been like that – very much with the Times Square notion. They’ve always had that connection to an underbelly of things.”

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FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: Do you think New York is still seedy?
Patrick Miller: It seems like it is getting harder to find, in a way.
BSA: So really you might say that this is a public service, this installation.
Patrick Miller: There are so many young people who have never had this experience today. Not only are we trying to share what that was like, it is something that shaped the way we are inspired as artists and the way we make imagery, the way we make icons. The roots of video-game culture are there and now that has sort of bled out today – but also we’re interested in the shared experience because so much of the video game experience is now mobile or is just had on your couch, I think people have forgotten that there used to be these places were you congregated to do this.

For the 5th public offering of FAILE BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade and the first in a museum setting, Faile extends the scope and adds a handful of new NYC-centric scenarios to the mix and again partners with fellow Brooklyn street artist and spin-cycle collage mutator-in-chief BÄST, whose stylistic counterplay alerts undercurrents of tension with a punk-naïve primal hand painting and humoristic Dada collaging.

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FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: Can you describe the working dynamic with Faile and BÄST?
Patrick Miller: We’ve always been really inspired by BÄSTs work because we start from a similar place but we end up totally differently.
BSA: Yeah the end result is very different
Patrick Miller: Ours are probably more structured and narrative.
Patrick McNeil: I think over time we have tried not to step on each others’ toes. He generally controls the half-tone territory and we control the line-drawing territory.
BSA: So his are more photography-based and yours tend more toward the illustration.
Patrick McNeil: Yep
Patrick Miller: I think the work comes from the same place but his is just turned up to “11”.
Patrick McNeil: Yeah his is more put into a blender.
Patrick Miller: But that has always been what makes us work well together, the styles mix and marry really well and they kind of bring the best out of both.
BSA: And he has become even more abstract recently – more lo-fi outsider artish…., although you guys have delved into children’s coloring books for inspiration as well
McNeil: I think BÄST would like to call it more “outsider art”.
BSA: Why has it been important to keep Deluxx Fluxx a Faile-BÄST collaboration over the last five years thoughout its various iterations?
McNeil: We started this project as a collaboration and we’ve been collaborating with BÄST for fifteen years. We’ve always enjoyed working with him because we just love the friendship and we love the product of our collaborations. I think having the opportunity to be at the Brooklyn Museum and to do it together with him is really special.

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FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Twenty-two in all, the custom designed variations on arcade video and pinball games from the 1970s and 80s alert competitive urges and quests for domination alongside more mundane tasks like alternate side of the street parking and completing atypical digital art-making sessions where “winning” is defined entirely differently.

Social, sexual, comical, criminal, and environmental concerns all pop and parry while you nearly mindlessly and repetitively punch buttons and fire guns at herky-jerky 2-D motion graphics that transport you to the hi-charged arcade experience rumbling in malls and sketchier parts of town before the Internet. Get a taste for those darkened caves where you racked up points while quarters were sucked from your pockets; you are the favored hero at home in this seductive lair, surrounded by an ear pounding audio-musical triumphalist barrage of hypnotic hormonal victory and id-shattering explosions.

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FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The adjoining cavernous black-light illuminated fluorescent foosball room is papered with mind-popping illustrations derived and sutured from comics, pulp and smarmy back-pages advertising that once stirred secret desires. Walking in on this teen temple you may feel like looking for dirty magazines sandwiched between mattresses; surely a hyped up juvenile would choose these alternating graphic “floor tiles” in radiation yellow, sugar coated pink and neon orange, giving your footsteps a spongey depth perception test on your way to a round of table football.

The floor-to-ceiling hand painted posters took four people six months to complete, both Patricks tell us, and they all compete for your attention, each a narrative re-configured and augmenting secret storylines, myths, and plenty of white lies.

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FAILE’s Patrick Miller demonstrates an art experience where you rip posters off the wall to reveal yet more Faile posters underneath, which you can rip further. FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Somehow it is here in the day-glo madness that we see the closest approximation to the original Street Art experience passersby had in the early 2000s with Faile’s work when they were still a trio that included artist AIKO and in those years just after her departure. These are the bold, familiar graphic punches thrown in a direction you weren’t expecting and can make you laugh.

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FAILE’s Patrick McNeil demonstrates how to tag subway walls before the “Bast Ghosts” come after you. FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In a media- and advertising-saturated society our tools of discernment and reason are compromised, deliberately so. Faile is recognizing some symptoms of this compromise and is examining the stories and the narratives that are told, crafting their own dramatic nomenclature from the pile. You might say that their stories are melding with an idealized simplification of North American white dude history, a heroic paranoid absolutism that lays bare the prejudices behind it.

A simple survey of words illustrates the perspective: prayer, bitch, horse, rainbow, sinful, Jesus, warriors, forbidden, Indian, hero, poison, brave, strong, boy, guilty, pleasure, bedtime, cowboys, hotrods, savage, gun, trust, stiletto, tender, hotel, confessions, fight, wolf, saved, girls, lies, vanity, inexperience, restless virgin, innocent, willing, heartbreak, torment, stories.

These are Faile stories, reconfigured with a slicing knife down the middle of the belly, an idiosyncratic collaged pop/pulp style that owes as much to the Dadaist Hannah Höch and pop collage originator Richard Hamilton as it does to Lichtenstein’s sense of storybook romance and Warhol’s repetitive emotional distance.

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FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In the book accompanying the exhibit, Sharon Matt Atkins, Vice Director for Exhibitions and Collections Management, who organized the exhibition, says the presentation of the arcade in a museum setting “highlights how the present work relates to the art of the past and expands our expectations of the use of public spaces dedicated to art.” Here, she says, “Deluxx Fluxx’s arcade machines, which are simultaneously sculptures and functioning games, may call to mind Surrealism, Dada, and Fluxus, as well as the enigmatic boxed assemblages of Joseph Cornell.”

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FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Similarly, the signature Temple project has not been presented in its entirety in museum settings previously, and it feels like it is a bit of inspired genius when you are standing in its shadow beneath the soaring sky light at the Brooklyn Museum. The full scale church in ruins was presented out of doors in Praça dos Restauradores Square in Lisbon in conjunction with Portugal Arte in 2010. Echoing its surroundings in Lisbon, the Temple here is also a willful remix of the epic and the rather lesser so.

Culture-jamming at its height, it’s a punk subversion in ceramic, marble and iron that simultaneously genuflects and gives the finger to antiquity and to our soulless consumer culture. By casting reliefs of stylized font-work, romance novelette themes, and ads for call girls in puzzling non-sequitors, the Temple ridicules vapidity while honoring connections to age-old themes, sort of humbling all involved. Here again Faile is questioning the received wisdom of art history, religious customs, and tales of great societies we’ve learned to be reverent of, or maybe just questioning our true knowledge of history altogether.

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FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

During the last months while it was being unpacked and assembled we heard the Temple also called a tomb, a mausoleum, a chapel – the differences shared by their ties to the architecture and sculpture and tiled mosaics and ceramic under one roof. The roof in this case is destroyed – possibly because it caved in or because it was ripped off by an angry god who said, “You have missed my point entirely!”

In any case it is a formidable structure allowing meditation, reflection, confusion. In an act of ultimate bait and switch, Faile has deliberately played with what you are supposed to be paying attention to, substituting the associated original intended and inferred meanings of a religious institution and its power. You approach with reverence, looking perhaps for an allegorical means to access the transcendental, but expected symbols have been supplanted by the shallow relics of a culture you may have intended to escape.

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FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ultimately Faile is not unlike a lot of the world’s great religions; Comforting, reassuring, challenging, mysterious, inpenetrable. Sometimes you have the feeling that there are other people who understand it much better than you. Oh, ye of little Faile. Lean not upon your own understanding. Failes ways are not necessarily our ways. Whether these words and narratives are written by man or handed down from a higher power, why sweat it? It’s a holy good show.

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FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

With FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds the Brooklyn museum is once again meaningfully invested in the present and jumped ahead in the examination of what clearly is the first global grassroots art movement, giving the stage to the current century’s voices of the street – perhaps because it has engaged with the city’s artists and communities.

With an enormous new Kaws sculpture in the lobby, Basquiat’s notebooks and Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition in the same year, Faile adds an important voice to the local/global narrative and to the dialogue about the appropriate role of art in the public sphere and major institutions in the cultural life of the community they a part of.

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FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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FAILE. Fantasy Island.  “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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FAILE. Wolf Within. Detail. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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FAILE. Ripped canvases. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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FAILE. Ripped canvases. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” at the Brooklyn Museum will open Friday, July 10th. Click HERE for further information.

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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
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This article is also published on The Huffington Post

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Manhattan Sheep Find Greener Grass in Chelsea

Manhattan Sheep Find Greener Grass in Chelsea

September 18, 2013

New York City has a beautiful sheep’s meadow.

It is fifteen grassy acres so-named in Central Park where 200 or so sheep lived for a number of generations in the mid-18th to 19th century, and later it became home to “love-ins”, concerts, and sunbathing. This week Manhattan officially has a second pasture for sheep to graze, although the rolling hills are much smaller and the sheep are slightly more stylized – and the site is a gas station in Chelsea.

brooklyn-street-art-francoise-xavier-lalanne-getty-station-jaime-rojo-09-15-13-web-4 Sheep Station with works by François-Xavier Lalanne at a former Getty filling station in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The surrealist scene will catch the eye of a hard driving taxi driver who used to top the tank off at this stop, but the month-long pastoral venue that officially opened yesterday will also make them crack a smile when they see the 25 epoxy stone and bronz “moutons” by François-Xavier Lalanne grazing around. One half of Les Lalannes with his wife Claude Lalanne, the French sculptor exhibited many iterations and new additions of his sheep beginning in the 1960s until his passing five years ago.

The new installation by real estate developer Michael Shvo in partnership with Paul Kasmin Gallery along 10th Avenue is similar to the work Les Lalannes would have done together in that it combines his interest in the sculptural and hers in vegetation and the natural world. In fact this French countryside hemmed in by white fencing will need to be mowed by humans, a job that real sheep would have gladly taken care of.

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Sheep Station with works by François-Xavier Lalanne at a former Getty filling station in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

You can imagine this public art show to be a corresponding component to an art fan’s day in Manhattan if they saw the upcoming Magritte exhibition at MoMA, Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 and then stopped by the Sheep Station on their way to a stroll along the nearby Highline in all its autumnal splendor. The orchestrated natural otherworld installation wanders freely between high concept and decorative and you’ll probably find this curious little patch of grass is an unusually welcoming pit stop, a psychological breath of fresh country air for the post-industrial traveler.

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Sheep Station with works by François-Xavier Lalanne at a former Getty filling station in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Sheep Station with works by François-Xavier Lalanne at a former Getty filling station in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Sheep Station with works by François-Xavier Lalanne at a former Getty filling station in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Sheep Station with works by François-Xavier Lalanne at a former Getty filling station in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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A wall piece installed earlier for another event remains from Street Artist/photographer JR and painter José Parlá.  Sheep Station with works by François-Xavier Lalanne at a former Getty filling station in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Sheep Station with works by François-Xavier Lalanne at a former Getty filling station in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Sheep Station with works by François-Xavier Lalanne at a former Getty filling station in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The public exhibition runs until October 20th and you can read more about Sheep Station at http://gettystation.com/

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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!

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Overunder Makes More Brain Candy for Living Walls : Albany

September 11, 2011

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Overunder is a fast-moving free-associating surrealist whose Street Art pieces catch your eye as you skip past a run down neglected piece of property. Always balancing on the edge of your reality and his boundless imagination, the painted plumcake pieces will strum the brainwaves and may make you all skittish like a cat at a rocking chair convention.

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Overunder on a burned out carcass of a building. (image © Overunder)

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Okay, which way we goin’?  (image © Overunder)

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Penny for your thoughts, bro. (image © Overunder)

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Overunder (image © Overunder)

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The trick for fashions for Fall ’11 is to accessorize. Just the right bling can take you from day to evening. (image © Overunder)

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Images of the Week 06.19.11

June 19, 2011

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A certain surreality is slipping through the sunbaked streets as we cross the summer threshold.  The mashup aesthetic of course has been going since the early days of Bast (or before), but now that visual moorings are loosed, all manner of recombinant strains of references and their assigned meanings are also aflight. Not all of these are examples of this movement, but many appear influenced by it. As usual, Street Art is as much a reflection of the society as it is a participant in its directional moves.

Our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Banksy, Clown Soldier, CV, Cyrcle, Delicious Brains, Gaia, Hellbent, Hugh Leeman, ILL, Imminent Disaster, Jolie Soutine, KAWS, Mosstika, QRST and ROA with photographs by Jaime Rojo, Carlos Gonzales, and Birdman.

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Mosstika has a new installation in the park in Dumbo, recalling the da-daist Brooklyn performance artist Gene Pool and his grass suits.  (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Mosstika. We have heard that the name of the piece is “Yeti” (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Imminent Disaster appears again on the street with this medallion of paper cutout and illustration. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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It looks like Clown Soldier now guards the only Banksy in Chicago. An unknown artist stenciled the image of the woman laying down on the “steps”, themselves a shadow of previous construction.  (photo © Clown Soldier)

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Delicious Brains “Last Supper” (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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JR’s global project “Inside Out” on the gates of the Green Hill Food Co-Op, where a huge neighborhood community reception was held Friday night to celebrate the new installations here. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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A casualty of lust on the streets. An unknown artist wheat-pasted the portrait of Brooklyn/Queens congressman Anthony Weiner, an outspoken powerhouse who advocated for populist causes during his 20 years of public service and who resigned his post this week amidst a Sexting scandal. Now the only question for Weiner is what’s up?  (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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CV. World hunger never went away. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Cyrcle “Overthrone!” in Los Angeles (photo © Carlos Gonzalez)

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Cyrcle “Overthrone!” In Los Angeles (photo © Carlos Gonzalez)

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Gaia (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Hellbent (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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ROA in Los Angeles as part of LA Freewalls project (photo © Birdman)

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To the left there is a new “Splasher” in town. To the right the “sorry” wheat paste is a faux street art installation for a movie shoot about love and youth. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Hugh Leeman “Indian Joe” (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Hugh Leeman at his studio (photo © courtesy of the artist)

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Hugh Leeman. “Sam” (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Jolie Soutine (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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This new QRST piece in Manhattan is an inscribed funeral dirge mourning the “disneyfication” of a once vibrant and envelop-pushing arts culture that made way for new artists in the city, with the visage of the current mayor worn as a mask by a plump and relaxed rat.  We can only assume it is a reference to Manhattan, because a creative Babylon is going full force in some parts of Brooklyn as we speak.  (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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QRST (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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A sticker intervention by an unknown artist (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Kaws reacts to the cost of bottle service in the Meat Market while sitting below the lush, landscaped, and recently extended Highline. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Kaws (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Untitled. The sky on fire as the sun sets on Manhattan Friday night. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Raarrrrhhrhrhhrrr! Veng Chomps Through Another Giant Wall (Bushwick)

June 4, 2011 , , , , , ,

Street Artist and burly bear Veng came out of hibernation this spring with a roaring hunger for walls and so far he’s foraged plenty of them in BKLN. From the breezy shores of La Isla Conejo to the rusty thickets of Bushwick, the borough of Brooklyn has a few hundred feet more of aerosol paint since this guy poked his head out of the cave during the thaw.

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Veng (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Just this week we found him placidly smacking his choppers and savoring the last taste of lunch while sitting on a sidewalk and surveying the sweeping Veng Vista across the street; almost one entire block length wall that he’s completing this weekend for the big Bushwick Open Studios 2011.

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Now in it’s 5th year and produced by the volunteer army Arts in Bushwick, the studios and streets are fair game for visitors and artists of all stripes and abilities. Each year it is entertaining and educational to witness who’s moved on, who’s still hanging on, and who’s just arrived to claim credit for it all. Veng is one of the hangers-on; in fact one of the starter-uppers when it comes to Street Art here.

As we reported yesterday, Factory Fresh Gallery has two entries in this year’s festival, a veritable double bill of Indoor and Outdoor. Inside the gallery is “Surrealism,” perhaps in honor of the British-born Mexican Surrealist Master Leonora Carrington who passed away May 25th or perhaps to acknowledge Surrealism’s many currents running through pop culture and street culture today.

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Veng (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The Outside portion showcases the “Bushwick Art Park”, FF’s entry to the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas, which proposes to build an art park on this very block of Vandevoort Place where Veng is painting. No stranger to surrealism himself, Veng often depicts his characters in other-worldly portraits with birds as hats and hats as boats and intricately detailed scenes nested within scenes.

These process shots from Thursday show him trampling along on the immense wall and by Friday he told us he’d be done. You’ll need to check this one yourself to verify. While bears can move fast sometimes, they also tend to favor long naps.

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Veng (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Veng (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Veng (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Veng (photo © Jaime Rojo). Brick walls make Veng very happy as he loves this pattern and the demarcation of the bricks makes his job a lot easier.  He was beaming with joy.

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Ah Summer: At the base of Veng’s ladder this dandelion stood sunny and willful amidst the aerosol fumes and drips and the trash (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Veng (photo © Jaime Rojo)

To learn more about Factory Fresh “Surrealism” Show click below:

http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/?p=21418

To learn more about “Bushwick Art Park” click below:

http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/?p=21422

For a complete and detailed listing of all the events taking place at BOS2011 click below:

http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/?p=21389

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