By Daniel Gomez
“Quick Turn Structure,” a term coined by Oyama Enrico Isamu Letter in an effort to describe his frenetic, angular style of abstraction, places a heavy emphasis on the overlapping and repetition of his trademark sharply-edged characters to form cohesive arrangements of winding, coiling, and often overlapping chains of implied motion.
The piece best exemplifying Letter’s mastery of the graffiti style on the art form’s own terms is the site-specific mural on the NJCU Visual Arts building’s gallery wall. In this particular piece, Letter demonstrates his ability to showcase his characteristic sweeping, boldly-lined arrangements on a colossal scale while simultaneously presenting it in the audacious and space-invading manner in which the graffiti style was initially intended to be displayed.
By increasing the scale of the work almost tenfold and transforming a gallery wall, floor, and ceiling into one large, unified canvas the artist communicates his ability to compete with the more traditional contemporary artists working in this style while also lending certain levels of authenticity and cohesiveness to the exhibit overall.
Intensifying the appeal of the mural and spanning the entire length of the room is the vinyl ceiling installation seemingly hovering just above it displaying the predominant motif of this collection in a linear yet nonetheless kinetic arrangement.
While all of the works featured in the VA gallery show were collectively interesting, one arrangement in particular managed to especially peak my personal interest.
FFIGURATI #63 – #86 is a collection of twenty four framed photos of historically significant stone busts depicting major leaders, aristocrats, and various other key figures from antiquity. Onto these photos, primarily in the facial region, Letter has meticulously carved a miniature abstraction with a similar line structure. In these pieces, perhaps the only pieces of a conceptual nature in the exhibition, Letter has tackled the idea of narcissism in the ancient figures that have chosen to immortalize themselves in stone. In a subversive manner that may in many cases offend some art historians, he has, in my personal opinion, made a bold and – to some degree – welcomed statement that is driven home by the disparate combination of his very modern “Quick Turn Structure” and the antiquated stone sculptures.
At its inception, when the general populace was introduced to this particular style of work art form, there was a natural inclination to relegate the it to a position that was perhaps less serious or worthy of notoriety than its counterparts in the hierarchy of contemporary art movements. However, over the years, artists such like Oyama Enrico Isamu Letter, who have managed to fuse the graffiti style with their own, have built on the foundation provided by early graffiti writers and reinterpreted it into something that manages to, in many ways, transcend the artform.
Japanese-born Letter’s body of work is undeniably influenced by the American “throw up” graffiti phenomenon of the late 1900s and early 2000s. That being said, he has managed to successfully appropriate the art form’s stylistic elements, such as its focus on crisp line work coupled with a bold contrast of value, and re-forge them into something altogether more mature and worthy of attention from both the contemporary fine arts community and design enthusiasts alike.