José rocks oh.zee

“I love the colourful graffiti – it’s just that I hate those ugly tags everywhere. Why can’t they just do the pretty stuff?”

I love tags. The good, the bad and the wak. The fact they piss off baby-boomers is just an added bonus for me. Once you’ve seen enough tags familiar patterns start to emerge, styles of stroke and specific letterforms echo across the city. A great tag, be it the whole word or even a single letter, can make my day. Sometimes a crap tag can be just as good, the sheer wakness is refreshing – as in how the fuck did they come up with that awful ‘e’… hang on, might just tweak that unique shape for myself… cheers! Whilst the tag is the simplest form of graff it is perhaps the most important – it’s the first step. The first decision to disobey and use the city as a canvas.

José Parlá does beautiful tags. The long, slanting stems in his letters and the speed of application generate a classic density. When layered as many times as José does, the tags almost grow from typography to a landscape of thought. By emulating the surfaces on which graffiti belongs, the contextual importance of a tag is posed. He explains it far better himself, so def check the video below.

Apart from the art radness, I kept finding a wake of smiles and nothing but praise wherever José had been. Totally confirmed when I bumped into the guy in St Kilda, nicest New Yorker I’ve met hands down. Make sure you get to his show at the Autopsy gallery, on until May 31st.