EXPRESSION OF PASSION
Author: Sarah München
Ever since seeing the film Wild Style at the age of 13, VISEone has been excited by graffiti art.
Immediately dreaming of one-day creating art along these lines, he began to live his dream in the early 1990s. Back then he was equipped strictly with spray cans and his creativity,
blank gray concrete façades that he coated with colorful graffiti. And regardless of where life took him, whether he was a DJ playing to thousands of people or an artist exhibiting his designer toy works worldwide, his love for graffiti art has always accompanied him.
Over the years, VISEone has repeatedly reinvented himself. Having a set technique or style, that was never VISEone and it never will be. Rather, he strives to always experiment with new things and combine techniques. Blending graffiti with stencils and pop art, his paintings are a synthesis of abstract color surfaces, rasterized photo elements, and tags. Sometimes his large-format canvases reflect energy and life, and sometimes his colors and shapes are very abstract, almost reduced. Inspiration finds VISEone everywhere, be it in cities, nature, photography, other artists, or his little daughter. And all of these are refl ected in his every piece of his work.
mixed media: acrylic paint, spraypaint, stencil, acetone | some works contain partially elements that are printed
FROM THE WALL INTO SPACE
Author: Sarah München
For years there had been an idea shelved within VISEone‘s mind: to peel his graffiti tag off the wall and put it three-dimensionally in a room, making it experienceable from multiple sides. And this idea became a reality in 2014 when he began freeing the letters from their original forms, reimagining them, and composing them as sculptural works of art.
The basis is often his own alias, VISE, but sometimes the “S” sneaks under the “V”. Another time, the letters stretch out in all directions. And should the “I” disturb the flow, he just discards it. In the end, these pieces become abstractions, concerned mainly with the beauty and the interplay of forms, colors, and material.
Dominating the spaces they are displayed in, these sculptures can be upwards of 1.8 meters tall and weigh as much as 120 kilograms, however – much work is required to create each one. At the beginning of each sculpture, VISEone draws the characters and then vectorizes them, composing a 3D model on his computer. A company is then enlisted to use this model, laser cutting the letters out of a metal plate. The resulting form is then bent, rolled, and welded together before fine grinding finishes its shape. To finish the piece, though, VISEone applies final touches, whether it is painting or treatment with acid or something entirely different. In the end, each of these works of art are unique in their own way.
VISEone is one of only a few artists in the world to create “graffiti sculptures” such as these. And he is recognized for it. For instance, in 2015 his NO LIMIT! sculpture was exhibited at
the world‘s largest urban art exhibition, the UrbanArt Biennale, allowing more than 110,000 visitors to view his piece.
„Writing is a central signet of the urban art [form]”, according to Dr. Meinrad Maria Grewenig, the General Director of the World Cultural Heritage Völklinger Hütte and curator of the Urban Art Biennale 2015, who finishes his thought by stating that „VISEone makes this writing a three-dimensional event and transform the writing into a sculpture.
With this position, he embodies a remarkable direction of urban art.“
STITCHED, STRIPPED, AND SQUEEZED: VISEone’s ART
Author: Nick Curtis (CoART MAGAZINE)
Ohlig breathed new life into his VISEone alias, using the name for his designer toy art pieces. Though he began creating works within the movement as early as 2007, it was two years later that he received his first exhibition invite for the Disney & MINDstyle curated Stitch Experiment 626 Project traveling art showcase, focused around hand-decorated vinyl renditions of the popular character from the Lilo & Stitch film. While VISEone’s contribution, 626 Cutie Monster, was a memorable work, it wasn’t until the following year that he truly revealed his unique voice within the field.
In May of 2010, VISEone revealed his first Comic Stripped series piece, an augmented vinyl sculpture that began his receiving international attention. By modifying the base vinyl into something that harkened to a comic book, cartoon, or comic strip character, pristinely placed epoxy clay cracks along its form allowed for carefully pasted panels from said mediums to be exposed. And after two well-received entries into this series, one a homage to Superman while the other was a tribute to the Fantastic Four, VISEone’s next pieces would inadvertently create a new conceptual line for him explore.
The four unique Comic Stripped Dunny pieces appeared to ooze out from specially made paint tubes, their vinyl forms suspended within the epoxy clay issuing forth, and each one was decorated with comic book based text. Due to the demand from collectors for this design concept, VISEone opted to explore it separately from Comic Stripped, abandoning the elements that attached this idea to the previous series and focusing instead on the aspect of pieces dripping from tubes. And while the Dunny form was the one predominantly used, VISEone explored other shapes within the dripping concept.
By the end of 2012, following the success of the Tube Dunny and similar pieces, VISEone opted to shift towards factory produced renditions of his concept, beginning with the Tube Monster and the following year’s Zombie Gooo! Lacking the juxtaposition created between consumer product aesthetics and handcrafted artistry, these would be the artist’s last designer toy works before shifting his artistic focus.
