Still Life #Green, 2025

Zurik  

OUTSIDE ART

ZURIK — Still Life #Green

Aerosol, acrylic spray, mixed technique on canvas — 100 × 100 × 2 cm — Unique piece

Statement of intention — Still Life #Green

“Still Life #Green" marks a new territory for ZURIK: the still life, a classic genre of Western painting, revisited through the prism of Graffiti and ZURIK's very personal style. It highlights the importance of this gesture: “Still life is a classic of painting and this is the first time I am painting a picture on this theme. The colors were chosen around the idea of antiquity mixed with a modernity such as graffiti. My lettering is anything but classic, mixing geometric and organic elements that adapt to the objects in a symbiotic relationship."

The chosen palette — greens, ochres, tones of antiquity — builds a tension between pictorial tradition and the contemporaneity of the Graffiti gesture. ZURIK's lettering does not decorate the represented objects: it interpenetrates them, reinterprets them, transforms them into a coherent whole where the letter and the object are of the same nature.

The revisited still life: from Graffiti to classic genre

The still life is one of the most codified genres of Western painting since the 17th century. From the Dutch “Vanitas" to the compositions of Chardin, from Cézanne to Morandi, it carries a dense pictorial tradition and rich symbolism. For an artist trained in Bogotá Graffiti to take up this genre for the first time — and on a 100 × 100 cm canvas, with spray and an aerosol — is a strong artistic gesture, which says something about ZURIK's aspiration to go beyond the definitive borders of their original discipline.

The result is neither a still life in the classical sense nor a piece of Graffiti in the traditional sense. It is something new: a composition where the genre and the original discipline contaminate each other, where the rules of one question the rules of the other, to produce a visual object that could not have existed without this dual belonging.

My lettering is anything but classic, mixing geometric and organic elements that adapt to the objects in a symbiotic relationship. — ZURIK

Institutional links

In 2021, ZURIK is included in the permanent collection of the STRAAT Museum in Amsterdam with the work “Eye contact" — a major institutional recognition that confirms its place in the landscape of international urban art. The STRAAT Museum, founded in the NDSM workshops of the IJ of Amsterdam, is today one of the world's reference collections in urban art, and the presence of a ZURIK work in its reserves places it in a corpus of leading artists.

In 2025, it will participate in the exhibition “Graffiti, letters & styles" at the Galerie du Boléro in Versoix (May 8 – July 27, 2025), organized in partnership with the exhibition OUTSIDE ART. This exhibition brings together seven international artists — BANDI, KASER, REYONE, SERVAL, SMASH137, WHYRE and ZURIK — around a questioning of the current state of Graffiti as a major artistic practice and as a living cultural heritage.

Formal analysis

The mixed technique of “Still Life #Green" — aerosol, acrylic spray — is at the service of a composition that mixes two visual registers: the represented objects (still life) and the lettering (Graffiti). These two registers are treated with the same care, the same precision: the objects are not painted realistically (which would betray the artist's Graffiti heritage), but they are not entirely absorbed by the lettering either.

The green and ochre palette creates an atmosphere of age, of patina. This chromatic tension is at the heart of the work: it materializes the meeting between pictorial tradition and urban culture, between what lasts and what is momentary, between the museum and the street.

The lettering always becomes, in ZURIK's work, a work of general shaping and arrangements between the figurative elements and the letters which become geometric elements. A particularity of this work that the artist has been able to explain is the visible white lines of variable thickness. This is another heritage of the Graffiti practice conceptualized in this unique work: they represent the “lights" serving to emphasize and give brilliance to the letter through this light effect. Here ZURIK exploits them to make them elements that have become abstract.

Certificate of authenticity issued by the artist

Still Life #Green is presented by OUTSIDE ART — out-side-art.com