OTTSTUFF (Estella, 1990) is an urban artist and graphic designer from Navarre — a former medieval kingdom of northern Spain. He fuses the languages of graphic design and iconographic graffiti, creating an oneiric and minimalist universe, where color plays the main expressive force. Iconographic graffiti, surrealism and minimalism are his main creative influences, also inspired by architecture and nature. Germinated in the public space, his artistic language approaches iconographic post-graffiti to a minimalist surrealism, addressing his interventions to the improvement of our daily relationship with the environment, throughout a constructive-affective transformation of it.
Mutable icon.
OTTSTUFF’s face silhouette stands out as his main icon, which allows him to address different topics related to the human essence from equity, disregarding stereotypical differentiations, also reinterpreting the environment as a semantic element. The dot, basic element of artistic expression, is another of the artist’s most characteristic iconographic elements, which is recurrent in most of his artworks.
Visual poetry and rhetoric.
Along with the use of color, visual poetry and rhetoric are essential contributions of graphic design to OTTSTUFF’s creative language. Searching for an autotelic aesthetic experience, originated through play, means both the starting and ending point: the creative process is an end in itself. The icon evolves as a rhetorical element, and environment plays a fundamental semantic role. The use of literary figures such as prosopopeia, anaphora or allegory is frequent along his creations.
Why post-graffiti?
Behind graffiti, there are different people, circumstances and creative concerns, and creativity does not understand of watertight compartments. Unavoidably, graffiti evolves and merges with other passions and knowledge, in parallel with the individual’s both personal and professional development, generating new variants. However, at a collective level, it is necessary to differentiate and safeguard the term ‘graffiti’ as an independent phenomenon.
