Description
ERPS – Oldie but Goldie
spray paint and markers on canvas, 30 x 30 cm
This piece compresses decades of street history into a dense, almost kinetic composition. A metro train bursts diagonally through the canvas, cutting across a chaotic urban landscape that unmistakably echoes Bucharest. The city tilts and bends around it, buildings lean, perspectives collapse, and the environment feels unstable, as if shaped by speed, adrenaline, and memory rather than physical rules. At the center sits ERPS’ signature lettering, layered, repeated, and reworked in multiple styles: tags, throw-ups, and bold, flame-edged pieces. This repetition mirrors the logic of graffiti itself: visibility, persistence, and territorial presence. The name becomes both subject and structure.
The tunnel functions as a visual hinge between worlds: street and system, surface and underground, past and present. Around it, fragments of graffiti culture accumulate: tags, characters, color bursts, and discarded spray cans scattered across the ground like evidence. The inclusion of these cans is deliberate, they ground the work in the physical act of painting, not just its aesthetic outcome.
There’s also a raw, almost obsessive energy in the composition. Nothing is static. The train advances, the letters vibrate, the city compresses inward. It reflects the artist’s known working rhythm – fast, relentless, pushing limits. The controlled chaos suggests someone who has spent decades mastering speed without losing precision.
Active since 1994, ERPS emerged in a grey Bucharest and became one of the city’s most consistent and respected graffiti writers. His ability to execute complex, large-scale works in remarkably short timeframes, often pushing physical limits and defying sleep, has become a defining trait of his practice. Over the decades, his lettering has coloured the urban imagination, leaving a lasting imprint on walls, trains, and now canvas.
