2501 has his first LA solo show opening later this month at Soze Gallery in Los Angeles. 2501 has very quickly become a must-have artist on the global mural festival circuit, and so I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of new work from him this summer, but his indoor work is equally breathtaking. The show, See you on the other side, opens DATE. Soze Gallery will follow up 2501’s show with a solo show from his friend Pixelpancho in June.
2501 also sent me this text to serve as an introduction to the show. It is written from the perspective of Gargamella, the villain from The Smurfs:
How many lines (circles) (shapes) did I paint (draw), altogether?
The question seems plain. Indeed, actual numbers are often given. But they disagree and – other than variants of “many”- most of them are meaningless because they give equal weight to flea-rabbit and horse-elephant.
The circle shape (form) and its content (lines or void or macchie) discourage the search for a single numerical answer.
With minimal aesthetic of the monotone use of color (variations of black and white with glance of gold and fluo steam) 2.501 questions the deeper meaning of a propensity toward abstraction and toward infinity.
Playing hide and seek with lines and into circles, 2501 creates a vast moving image pervaded by dialectic between seriality –(reality) and disruption, between repetition and variation. (Roughness and smoothness)
Lines highlight the dynamics of graphic influences trough a constant evocative crescendo of juxtaposing and layering; video, tools, images and sounds trace a living path that weaves between explosions and silence, devastation and contemplation, (rise and fall).
Acting as a portal to somewhere else and as a threshold to the exhibition, the circles reveal a process of hidden connections and cuts, became a bridge without linear shape through which the comprehension of the ways of seeing are challenged. Evolving (animated) surface suggest vertiginous ways of experiencing / seeing/ visualizing, according to the point of view that sight is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to people as they are.
How many circle (lines) (shape) will I paint (draw), altogether? I don’t know but I keep looking for (looking at- we only see what we look at) an infinite (we never look at just one thing) numerical answer. Because the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. And the aim has been to start a process of questioning.
(to look is an act of choice and a process)
Photo courtesy of 2501