Graffiti News

Perpetual Drift, an exhibition of work by Bhuwal Prasad at Travancore Palace in New Delhi, placed graffiti-inspired aesthetics in conversation with folk and tribal visual traditions. According to Times of India, Eikowa Contemporary presented the exhibition, which closed on September 30. Its paintings, 3D paintings and sculptures explored how urban experience, nature and cultural memory might occupy a shared visual space.

Graffiti provides a way to read the surface

Graffiti enters Prasad’s work through a vocabulary of intricate lines, layered forms and unconventional typography. Back alleys and other overlooked parts of urban life supplied points of departure. For readers interested in street art, the useful question is how those visual ingredients operate within a composition: where a line carries the eye, where forms crowd together, and where something apparently abstract becomes recognisable.

A first reading can begin with the overall density. Prasad’s compositions initially appear abstract, yet closer attention reveals pieces of architecture, vehicles, plants, animals and human figures. The shift between these two readings matters. A recognisable fragment offers a temporary foothold within the surface; the surrounding lines then draw attention back to the larger arrangement. Identification becomes one stage of looking rather than the end of it.

Unconventional typography offers another entry point. A viewer can follow a shape as though it were part of a letter, then consider its place among the neighbouring figures and lines. This approach keeps attention on the relationship between graphic rhythm and depicted subject. It also makes the graffiti influence legible through the organisation of the surface, alongside the urban fragments embedded within it.

Neo-Urbanism brings the city into contact with nature

Prasad calls his imagined space Neo-Urbanism: a setting in which contemporary urban life can reconnect with nature and move beyond controlled, technology-driven city environments. The exhibition gave that idea a visual form through compositions containing both urban elements and living beings. Architecture and vehicles share attention with flora, fauna and people, making their relationships a central part of reading the work.

One way to approach those relationships is to locate a recognisable object and then inspect what surrounds it. A piece of architecture can be read in relation to a nearby living form; a human figure can be followed outward into the lines around it. The emphasis moves from naming separate subjects to observing how they inhabit the same constructed space. That change in attention suits work poised between the recognisable and the imagined.

Folk and tribal visual traditions are part of this construction, alongside the rebellious vocabulary of postmodern graffiti. Prasad brought these strands together in an exploration of urban existence, cultural memory and human experience. For a street-art reader, the combination offers a reason to look beyond subject matter alone. The arrangement of the forms, and the way one visual register meets another, also carry the work’s concerns.

Contrasting figures and the gaps between them build connections

Prasad repeatedly pairs forms that seem opposed: human and animal, man and woman, flying and crawling. These pairings suggest a wider interconnected world. Ideas associated with animism and Shintoism enter through an understanding of living forms as parts of a larger ecological network. Looking at the pairs together makes their relationship as significant as the identity of either figure.

The intervals between figures deserve the same attention. Overlapping lines, gaps and broken forms connect the visible subjects to a more complex visual mapping of consciousness and environment. A practical reading can trace one boundary until it overlaps another, then pause at an opening or interruption. Empty space becomes part of the structure being examined, while fragmented outlines keep the eye moving between possible connections.

Because Perpetual Drift has closed, its relevance here lies in this vocabulary for reading the works. Start with the lines, find the urban and living fragments, then return to the spaces that hold them in relation. Readers exploring street-art locations can use the Wallscape map; the exhibition adds a separate exercise in following graffiti-derived forms across a densely organised composition. Prasad’s work makes the passage from recognising an object to reading its surroundings a central part of looking.

Source: Times of India