REAS

(New York City, 1969)

A New Yorker, Todd James began painting the New York City subway system under the name REAS at a very young age. He developed an unconventional style for his letters and was — alongside writers like Ghost, Mesh, Fuel, and Pure — an important member of the prestigious crews AOK (All Out Kings) and RIS (Rocking It Suckers), which remained active on the BMT lines despite pressure from the NYPD Vandal Squad and the Mayor’s office.
Self-taught, he has been drawing and painting since the 1990s. His painting is iconic and reflects a variety of influences, including comics, cartoons, pop culture, and American expressionist painters. His works feature bold colors and fluid, integrated shapes without outlines, giving subjects a sense of lightness. Reas desecrates serious contemporary themes — from war to terrorism to eroticism — removing their dramatic charge and infantilizing them. His famous series of Somali pirates, masked and armed with AK-47s, relaxing in a pastel paradise, is well known.
Recognized among the best emerging international artists, REAS was featured in the 1998 Daze and Crash exhibition at Palazzo Enrico Coveri in Florence and collaborated with Barry McGee and Steve Powers on the Street Market show at Deitch Projects, later presented at the 2001 Venice Biennale. His works have been exhibited at Tate Liverpool, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Art in the Streets show at MOCA LA, and galleries worldwide.

toddjamesreas

toddjames.com

SHOE

(Amsterdam, 1967)

A pioneer of European writing, Niels Meulman, aka SHOE, is an icon of the movement. His moniker “Shoe” was born in 1979, and his first tags date back to the early 1980s. He grew up in Amsterdam, one of the driving centers of the European punk movement, heavily influenced by its aesthetics and language; in Amsterdam, he met Dondi White during a roadshow organized by Jaki Kornblitt’s gallery, and in 1984 he painted in New York with Rammellzee and Keith Haring. For many years he worked as an art director in top advertising agencies before returning to the art world in 2007 when he founded the Calligraffiti movement — a writing style combining calligraphy and graffiti — asserting the principle that “a word is an image and writing is painting.”
His gestural, calligraphic painting is influenced by abstract expressionist masters and advertising graphics. His name, a “headline,” and calligraphic practice are the core of his aesthetic research.

nielsshoemeulman.com

REVOK

(Riverside, California 1977)

Jason Williams, aka REVOK, is one of the boldest and most influential writers of his generation. Born in Riverside (California) in 1977 and raised in Los Angeles, he had an early encounter with writing. He was a member of two world-famous crews: The Seventh Letter, an acclaimed West Coast artist collective, and Mad Society Kings (MSK). For two decades, he illegally painted trains and walls in America and worldwide, constantly challenging the boundaries of creativity and law. He has been arrested numerous times.
His self-taught artistic career began in Detroit in 2011 with assemblages made from found materials and vibrant colors. His work is abstract, inspired by the metropolitan environment, and develops an aesthetic combining color, geometric shapes, texture, and collage.
Revok loves experimenting with techniques and developing tools; his art finds freedom in its naivety. His work was included in Art in the Streets at MOCA Los Angeles in 2011 and the same year in Street Cred at the Pasadena Museum of Contemporary Art.

jasonrevok.com