Benjamin Rubloff

Benjamin Rubloff’s paintings in this book are all based on fragments of found graffiti. For many years, the artist photographed tags as he walked around the city, mainly because he was interested in their painterly qualities: the speed of a gesture, the way they sit on a wall, their random drips and splashes. As an experiment, he began copying these marks into oil paintings, altering the scale and framing, but otherwise aiming for an exact transcription of the original tag. His intention was to create abstract paintings that would not bear the qualities of his own hand. Instead, they would be records of the traces of others.

When he retraced his steps — sometimes years later — to find the original tags, Rubloff often found them gone. Sometimes the sites themselves had been radically altered. He began to write about these places in conjunction with the paintings, exploring the intersection of their histories with his own. As a result, each painting in the book is accompanied by a text and a photograph of the site, intended to provide an anchor back to the city itself.