2015
Exterior Masonry on wall
5 x 25 x 4 m

Sponsored by: Farrow & Ball
Commissioned

Daan Roukens was commissioned by Buutvrij for life, to create a wall painting for the advertising agency’s office in Amsterdam. For years, the façade had been marred by ugly tags. As Reuben Alexander, co-founder of Buutvrij for life, put it: “At Buutvrij, we solve creative puzzles every day, always with a positive twist. The outside of our office was also a bit of a puzzle, because in recent years it had been used as a kind of scratch pad for beginning graffiti artists. The façade looked terrible, and once you clean a wall like that, it immediately becomes an invitation for new tags.”

In contrast to the chaotic, colourful graffiti, Roukens opted for long, clean lines in black, white, and grey. The process of turning chaos into order and finding that in-between moment was visually less present. Still, it produced a new, ambiguous experience: the underlying graffiti had disappeared, but the clean lines once again symbolised a kind of writing paper to tag on. However, it’s an unwritten rule among graffiti artists that you don’t tag over someone else’s work, and so, paradoxically, it remains both a blank sheet and a work of art at the same time.