Exploding in slow motion
One of the people who seizes this opportunity at the beginning of the Nineties is Mirko Reisser. When he first uses a spray can for graffiti in 1989, he is already relatively old for the scene – 17, in fact. (Most beginners are younger, around 14 or 15.) But his late start does have an advantage: he gets his driving licence soon after that and then drives around and ‘gets up to all kinds of things,’ he says. No-one knows what he is up to except his fellow sprayers, so his unsuspecting parents are more than a little surprised when a policeman rings the doorbell one evening. There’s no cause for worry, really, though – Reisser produces his first commissioned works in 1991 soon after finishing school and starts earning his own money with spraying.
Initially, the graffiti he creates involves figures, but this kind of spraying can never detach itself completely from other directions in art as the parallels to comics and photography are obvious; there is always something out there you can be compared with or associated with. Style writing is new, however. It has its own precursors and role models, of course, but it’s unique in the form in which it evolves in the graffiti scene. What Reisser finds particularly interesting about it is the tense relationship between chaos and control. On one hand, writers can style the letters they spray in countless ways – the fancier or more unusual they are, the better – but on the other hand, typography lays down rules that you can’t avoid, even underground; an ‘A’ will always be an ‘A’, so your scope for creativity is limited. Exploring these degrees of freedom is what art is all about – in Mirko Reisser’s case, as he says with irony, he’s been exploring how to paint the same four letters in different ways for the last 30 years. ‘But the way I do it has got a lot to do with myself each time – with my own character, I mean’, he says, adding: ‘My pictures have changed just as much as I have in 30 years.’

Two aspects particularly stand out in this continuous process of change: the range of colours he uses decreases, while the amount of abstraction increases. ‘In the course of time, my work has got greyer and the range of colours I use has got smaller’, he explains. ‘There are strong highlighting colours now, though.’ The prominent bright green and orange in ‘DAIMmonomania III’ demonstrate this quite clearly, just like the tendency to be abstract. In this three-panel painting, the artist has used a technique he only tried out before on aluminium honeycomb panels, a new kind of material he has just started working with. It involves masking some areas to create sharp lines that couldn’t be made as precise just by hand-spraying them. The letters aren’t made by masking, though – Reisser says that isn’t an option: ‘I like the contrast. If you spray by hand, it can never be perfect because you just can’t spray super fine lines. The masked areas are a real contrast.’ What his pictures capture these days isn’t initial explosions, but stages in between – the moments before something else happens. But whatever’s going on there goes even further than that.
Where is this development going? Are the colours gradually losing their intensity? Will the areas and shapes pushing out from the back continue to conquer the space around them? At the end of the day, only the pictures that are to come will show us. ‘Sometimes I wish things would happen faster’, says Mirko Reisser. The explosion’s happening in slow motion. The story of the four letters isn’t over yet.