Acrylic spray and mixed techniques (paint brush, brush, brush, adhesive tape) on canvas — 300 x 150 cm — Unique piece
Statement of intent — Style Loops
Style Loops names what the eye first recognizes in a Serval piece: the curve that returns, the line that closes upon itself, the letter that opens and resolves into a single breath of movement. The title is a programmatic statement — an invitation to read graffiti not as a series of independent signs, but as a continuous pictorial loop, where form, gesture, and time are inseparable.
Serval has been practicing graffiti since 1992, more than thirty years of work on the letter, on walls first, then on canvas. What Style Loops shows is the culmination of this long duration: not the sought-after and constructed letter, but the letter memorized, liberated in pure movement.
Serval allows himself for the first time not to "clean" his line, his curve. The purpose of the work is rather the demonstration of an energy, an aesthetic statement that can vary from one day to another according to the experience that crosses the author.
Grammar of the gesture
The work draws from two seemingly distant sources: Serval's deep familiarity with the language of American cartoon from the 1950s — Tex Avery, the Fleischer brothers, Popeye, Betty Boop — and Frank Stella's research on curve and geometry. From one, Serval retains the organic energy of the stroke, the capacity of a line to concentrate movement and humor, life. From the other, he draws the rigor of the color placed in the field, the awareness of the surface as a space to organize.
What Style Loops puts in the foreground is not the legibility of the name, but the rhythm of its stroke: the way each stroke calls for the next, the way the style emerges from the cyclical return of a gesture practiced for decades.
The style is born of repetition. Each letter returns — slightly different, slightly displaced.
Place in the artist's practice
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Style Loops belongs to a collection of studio works in which Serval reexamines, on canvas, the codes of an urban discipline that has reshaped the global graphic vocabulary for almost half a century. The piece is part of the continuity of his monographic exhibition "Above the Clouds" — with a central technical difference: where "Above the Clouds" explored the letter and movement through oil painting on linen, Style Loops returns to spray — the writer's original tool — and puts it in dialogue with mixed techniques: paint brush, brush, brush, adhesive masking tape.
This work is part of an extremely rare collection: only two pieces — Style Loops and Infinity Lessons Unlearned — have been created specifically for the exhibition "Graffiti, letters and styles" organized by the Versoix cultural center "Le Boléro" in partnership with the gallery OUTSIDE ART.
A resident at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Genève (MAH), where he has been a resident artist since 2016, Serval also develops his vision, his practice, and his knowledge by drawing on a variety of artistic currents, eras, and collections.
Artist with a singular trajectory — born of a dual Swiss and American nationality, trained on the walls of Geneva and then in the streets of Philadelphia between 1995 and 1999 —, Serval is also a dancer, illustrator, and author. It is this multiplicity of practices — the body, the image, the text — that nourishes the emotional and formal density of his canvases. His work has been the subject of international publications (World Piecebook, Prestel, 2011; Graffiti Burners, Dokument Press, 2011) and exhibitions from Tel Aviv to Mannheim, from New York to Singapore.
Formal analysis
The composition is organized in an exceptional panoramic format, which imposes its own reading rhythm — from left to right, in the natural direction of the gesture. The background is a setting of deep carmine red, worked with spray in atmospheric layers whose superimpositions create shades of burgundy, plum, amaranth. In this red depth, vapors of cobalt blue and pink diffuse in nebulousness, giving the canvas an almost cosmic quality — as if the lettering were evolving in a sidereal space.
Painted in this way, the S of SERVAL becomes like the loop of infinity, a structure that his signature letter has begun to take throughout his work. Despite the fluidity of the form, the work of detail on the angles remains important for determining its own identity. In his artistic practice intimately linked to Graffiti, Serval approaches the notion of "identity artistic practice" which draws from the detail of the letter work from typography as well as the abstract gesture that begins to "define the artist's identity and his work," according to Fabienne Verdier.
Style Loops like Infinity Lessons Unlearned reflects the author's obsession with mastering his rendering, whereas here he has accepted for himself and for this collection, the approach of "showing the layers, the mistakes and letting them live their life and be part of the process as they do outside, on a wall". It is a way for the artist to give space to what exists by definition, in the spirit and practice of street graffiti on a wall or the "pieces" succeed each other and let themselves appear one another, in a fragmented way, when they are not totally covered.
The letter, as the form around which this canvas is organized, manifests in bright orange-red according to wide and muscular curves. Applied with a wide brush, the streaks of the tool remain visible in the pictorial material, giving the stroke a sculptural quality and a tactile presence that spray alone cannot achieve.
In contrast, two interventions in turquoise cyan cut through the warmth of the red: a large loop at the top, a halo, a classic symbol and code in Graffiti, perfectly positioned above what can be likened to the head of the S.
The star visible in the bottom right, the same color as the halo, is a traditional way of Graffiti to highlight its name developed in the time when the tag was still initiating the premises of this movement.
In the top left, two small rectangles of pure color — acid green and cyan — delimited with adhesive tape before spray, function as chromatic anchors in the composition. Discreet but precise, they evoke the color fields of Frank Stella and remind that Style Loops is part of a tradition of abstract painting as well as the heritage of street Graffiti.
Style Loops is a piece that does not choose between its ascendancies. It holds together the gesture of the writer and the awareness of the painter, the spontaneity of thirty years of walls and the rigor of a residency in the heart of the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Genève. In this way, it offers a direct entry into the formal vocabulary of one of the most singular artists in Geneva of his generation.
Certificate of authenticity issued by the artist
Style Loops is presented by OUTSIDE ART
