Acrylic spray paint and mixed media (painting knife, brush, masking tape) on canvas — 300 x 150 cm — Unique piece
Note of intent — Style Loops
Style Loops names what the eye first recognizes in a piece by Serval: the recurring curve, the line that closes in on itself, the letter that opens and resolves itself in 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 working with lettering, first on walls, then on canvas. What Style Loops reveals is the culmination of this long period: not the letter sought and constructed, but the letter known by heart, liberated in pure movement.
For the first time, Serval allows himself not to "clean up" his line, his curve. The aim of the work is rather to demonstrate an energy, an aesthetic statement that can vary from day to day depending on the experiences of its author.
Grammar of gesture
The work draws on two seemingly disparate sources: Serval's deep familiarity with the language of 1950s American cartoons—Tex Avery, the Fleischer brothers, Popeye, Betty Boop—and Frank Stella's explorations of curves and geometry. From the former, Serval retains the organic energy of line, the capacity of a single line to concentrate movement and humor, life itself. On the other hand, he derives the rigor of color applied in the field, the awareness of the surface as a space to be organized.
What Style Loops puts forward is not the readability of the name, but the rhythm of its design: the way each stroke calls for the next, the way the style emerges from the cyclical return of a gesture practiced for decades.
Style is born from repetition. Each letter returns — slightly different, slightly displaced.
Place in the artist's practice
Style Loops belongs to a studio collection in which Serval re-examines, on canvas, the codes of an urban discipline that has reshaped the global graphic vocabulary for almost half a century. The piece follows on from his solo exhibition "Above the Clouds"—with one key technical difference: where "Above the Clouds" explored lettering and movement through oil painting on linen, Style Loops returns to spray paint—the writer's original tool—and puts it in dialogue with mixed media techniques: palette knife, brush, paintbrush, masking tape.
This work is part of an extremely rare collection: only two pieces — Style Loops and Infinity Lessons Unlearned — were created specifically for the exhibition “Graffiti, Letters and Styles" organized by the Versoix cultural center “Le Boléro" in partnership with the OUTSIDE ART gallery.
As a resident at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva (MAH), where he has been an artist-in-residence since 2016, Serval also develops his perspective, his practice and his knowledge by drawing on a variety of artistic movements, periods and collections.
An artist with a unique trajectory—born of dual Swiss and American citizenship, trained on the walls of Geneva and then in the streets of Philadelphia between 1995 and 1999—Serval is also a dancer, illustrator, and writer. It is this multiplicity of practices—body, image, text—that fuels the emotional and formal density of his canvases. His work has been featured in 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, applied with spray paint in atmospheric layers whose overlaps create nuances of burgundy, plum, and amaranth. Within this red depth, vapors of cobalt blue and pink diffuse in nebulosity, giving the canvas an almost cosmic quality—as if the lettering were evolving in a celestial space.
Painted in this way, the S of SERVAL becomes like the loop of infinity, a structure that his signature letter began to take on throughout his work. Despite the fluidity of the form, the attention to detail on the angles remains important in defining its unique identity. In his artistic practice, intimately linked to graffiti, Serval explores the notion of "identity-based artistic practice," which draws as much from the detailed work on the letter derived from typography as from the abstract gesture that begins to "define the artist's identity and their work," according to Fabienne Verdier.
Style Loops, like Infinity Lessons Unlearned, reflects the artist's obsession with mastering the final product, with the difference that here, for himself and for this collection, he has embraced the approach of "showing the layers, the mistakes, and letting them live their own lives and become part of the process, just as they do outside, on the wall." It's a way for the artist to give space to what exists by definition, in the spirit and practice of graffiti on walls, where "pieces" follow one another and reveal themselves in fragments, when they are not completely covered.
The letter, as the form around which this canvas is organized, manifests itself in a vivid red-orange with broad, muscular curves. Applied with a wide brush, the tool's striations remain visible in the paint, giving the line a sculptural quality and a tactile presence that spray paint alone cannot achieve.
In contrast, two interventions in turquoise cyan stand out against the warmth of the red: a large loop at the top, a "halo" symbol and classic code in Graffiti, perfectly positioned above what can be likened to the head of the S.
The star visible at the bottom right, the same color as the halo, is a traditional way in Graffiti to highlight one's name, developed at a time when tagging was still initiating the beginnings of this movement.
In the upper left corner, two small rectangles of pure color—acid green and cyan—outlined with masking tape before spraying, act as chromatic anchors within the composition. Discreet yet precise, they evoke Frank Stella's color fields and remind us that Style Loops is rooted as much in the tradition of abstract painting as in the legacy of street graffiti.
Style Loops is a piece that doesn't choose between its influences. It combines the gesture of the writer and the awareness of the painter, the spontaneity of thirty years on walls and the rigor of a residency at the heart of the Museum of Art and History in Geneva. In this way, it offers direct entry into the formal vocabulary of one of the most singular Genevan artists of his generation.
