ARTIST STATEMENT

Kai Motta is a London born self-taught studio artist currently based on the south coast of England. Initially inspired by graffiti, street art and hip hop he later became obsessed with Abstract Expressionism. He now exploits both mediums to produce his graffiti-esque abstract asemic artwork. Asemic art is a form of visual art that uses marks, symbols, or “writing-like” gestures that have no specific semantic meaning.

Western graffiti is ego-driven, born from subculture and survival, where the name becomes the art and the artist becomes a brand. In contrast, traditional calligraphy dissolves the self, each stroke is discipline, repetition, and erasure. Where graffiti declares the self, calligraphy transcends the ego. In today’s visual culture, identity is branding, and even resistance is stylised for consumption, from advertised anarchists to marketed revolutionaries. Motta fuses the two together on the canvas with old credit cards or uncleaned brushes where the paint has dried and formed a calligraphic edge.

Neoliberalism is a theme that features in Motta’s works. Many paintings are produced within an area of the canvas, masked off to leave a border around the work. Inside the border represents the studio, where Motta is free to produce his abstract graffiti asemic paintings. The border symbolises the constraints of the contemporary neoliberal world in which we all must return to and function within.

“We now inhabit a world where the freedom to be oneself is increasingly constrained and attacked, the act of conforming is ever-present and ubiquitous, every movement is monitored, tracked and continually under the microscope without any real protest, and using artificial intelligence every future step is now planned and digitally co-ordinated. From what and how we consume, to exercising, our love lives, and more, information is constantly being collected and stored to govern and direct/re-direct our lives to be used for nothing more than to gain profit from in this neoliberal period. This breeds competition, isolation and insecurity, symptoms of this meaningless age.”

“The canvas for me is a catharsis, an act of freedom, a place to be free in the Brave New Digital world.”