A passage on earliness, speed and volume.
In her book La viuda Basquiat, the author and former partner of the famous North American artist of Puerto Rican and Haitian descent Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jennifer Clement, recounts one of the daily scenes in the intimate life of both, prior to the arrival of commercial success in the art circuit of New York in the early eighties:
“Jean-Michel never reads.
He picks up mythology and history books, anatomy books, comic strips or newspapers.
He looks for the words that he feels attack him and reproduces them on his canvas.
He listens to things Suzanne says and writes them on her pictures.
He listens to television.
One day he says:
- Suzanne, I'm almost a famous painter and I don't know how to draw.
Do you think I should be worried?
- Well, learn and there will be no problem.
That same day Jean-Michel returns home with seven books on how to draw - How to draw horses, How to draw flowers, How to draw landscapes, etc.
This was all irony."
Before being recognized as the last enfant terrible of modern art, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a mystical and legendary character on the streets of New York in the second half of the seventies, better known as SAMO: subversive, dislocated messages, precarious graffiti and cryptic that sowed disconcerting messages available to passers-by.
There is a recurring phrase in the world of literature: "Many want to write like Charles Bukowski, but nobody wants to live like Bukowski lived."
This sentence comes to mind within the world of the arts, where characters such as the French writer Antonin Artaud or the Brazilian Arthur Bispo do Rosário perfectly exemplify the historical relationship between art and what the Hungarian philosopher Peter Pál Pelbart has called " The community of those without a community”, alluding to marginal, nihilistic or divergent neuro personalities.
Like Basquiat, Artaud, do Rosario, Richard Hambleton, Raymond Pettibon or Egon Schiele, for a cryptic, mystical and emerging character like YAST, the pseudonym of this enigmatic street character who tries not to reveal his identity, human expression from the visual impact it is a vital medium that escapes from the increasingly limited and normalized world of cultural and intellectual spheres, but above all of artistic spheres.
For the past eight or nine years, some buildings, elevated fences, bridges, and constructions in the city have awakened and confronted the driver and the passer-by with strange large-format symbols: different types of crosses, drained pentagrams, and esoteric logos that tell stories.
What are these narratives? Is it just another advertising campaign for an upcoming series to be released? Why are they there, who made them and what do they want to tell us?
We do not know.
But we imagine things, and in that freely imagining we intuit something, we imagine something.
It is there, but we still do not dare to name it.
People track on Instagram the birth of another legend of local street art like Zombra or Siler, another local hero who returns the vitality of street graphics to its essence, outside of books, galleries and aesthetic consumer items.
It is not art, it is not graffiti, at most future graffiti, not graffiti or post graffiti as its author calls it.
Your name?
He hardly signs anymore but connoisseurs know him: YAST.
“My intention is to confuse and make people wonder things”: YAST.
Friendship, tags and pranks
On an apparent fake and abandoned Yast Instagram account, his biography can be read in capital letters: EGO IS NOT THE WAY.
For his part, in the official account he says with almost the same intention and attitude, which in turn seems like a declaration of principles: I DON'T CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU LIKE.
I NEVER TRIED.
In a heated and half-lit interview, derived from coincidences and wills, YAST, the author of these enigmatic and giant pints that have aroused curiosity and interest in the city, talks in an intimate, affable and leisurely way, while he puts on and he constantly takes off his cap, which has been defaced by his friends, alternating with a bite of a slice of pizza and a drink of his beer, which warms up almost immediately.
With 33 years of age in the troubled 2022, YAST tells the origins of his love for illegality, graffiti, the street and the search for his own voice that stands out from the rest.
“Since I was little I liked to paint, I did it everywhere.
In high school I had problems because once we went to a choral poetry contest and I painted the bathroom of the theater where we performed;
They disqualified us because of me.
At that time I scratched like AROK, that was my tag [signature, label].
And I never took it seriously, nor did I say 'I want to be like the Zombra or the Siler'.
I liked it more on the mischief side, I found it funny and I liked how it looked”, confesses the character, who emphatically avoids calling himself an artist, but who connects certain meeting points with his vitality and heart.
“My local heroes were my friends, the OINK, who were more punk.
He was three years older than me, he painted very cool and brought a different style to the others;
I liked what he did, I knew him and I approached him.
I also really liked some friends who painted from above, more aerials and bombs [a very popular style of typography-graffiti].
There was a crew called EDH, a little known in the north of the city.
When I entered high school I found more people who painted, at a more local level as well, from school.
At the time of 90s graffiti, graffiti was linked to hip-hop culture, it was what it was.
When I was more ska and punk, I didn't like rap, but the aesthetic was hip-hop graffiti, the five elements”.
"I don't care if the people who see it know who I am, but I am interested in standing out in my field and being part of my city."
Later, with the passage of time and the late arrival of the
rave
subculture around electronic music, via the
psychedelic trance
style , YAST would meet other friends, with whom he would begin to insert figures, pop references and a certain color detached from graffiti. conventional.
YAST refers to them by their aliases,
crews
, and pseudonyms in an affectionate and familiar way.
“I just met the XOURE, the BTM, the ATB, because they were
ravers
and the painting style changed towards something more innovative.
They were no longer convex letters, but figures that looked like letters: DOMEK put a TV in the O, others in the C painted a moon.
And that also coincided with the consumption of other drugs that were being consumed habitually, the paintings (LSD) stimulated a clearer and more colorful psychedelia in the graffiti.
And that was also developed a little by Zombra, when it was PET, at the beginning of the two thousand.
They made that difference,” says YAST.
Three to four hours and the wee hours of the morning is best.
An offering for a broken heart
“The birth of YAST is a somewhat sad and melancholic story: I dated a girl, we were dating, we got pregnant, first she wanted to have it and then she didn't.
In the first days I had been very excited, she even had a name, she was going to be a girl and I thought that she was going to be called Jasmine.
It was for the year 2005-2006.
Everything broke, we cut and I sank a little.
I was doing nothing.
One day I thought about making offerings for Jazmín and I started making tags, at first it was with J, double A and double zeta, because the girl I was dating danced jazz too, ”says YAST.
The intimate and significant experience led YAST to link its interests in the large format with a search that separated it from its contemporaries from the material (colors and instruments) to the discursive, going from the reformulation of the typographic within the possibilities of unconventional graffiti, to cryptic and esoteric symbology.
When YAST took the roller and the monumental as tools, about nine years ago, it was still signed as AROK, however, the transfer to YAST would open up the possibility of the symbolic, much more powerful and disconcerting on a visual level.
A four-inch roller, cheap water-based paint, a bassinet [sandwich, food], and nothing else.
“(...) When I kept painting AROK the letters didn't help me, and that's how I changed to YAST, with Y, S and T, so there were no closed letters and it looked better.
I don't move him and there's no reason to move him.
I didn't invent anything either, but I am trying to establish something, I haven't achieved it one hundred percent, but it's already looking different”, confesses YAST, who still sees himself in a search for consolidation despite already having a genuine language and well defined.
The method of achieving impressive pieces in strategic places includes a whole night ritual, which abstracts and concentrates all the attention of its author, incorporating the late night hours and the transition between days as the ideal time to achieve it.
YAST is open and detailed in telling us about his work dynamics, which he enjoys and demands in equal parts: “It has a whole process: I go, I see the
spot
[place, canvas], I check where to upload and where to paint, what is there around.
I let it go for a while, I meditate and then I go.
Regularly when I roller I prepare very well, they are offerings, I never go drunk.
It takes me about three hours and I do it on rooftops because the pigs [the police] never see the sky.
I have been caught three times and it has been due to complaints from the people who live in the buildings I paint”, says the author of compositions where the wild red and black predominate and impact the main avenues of the metropolis.
Precisely the aspect of illegality is an important element to bring the pieces to fruition, since that preserves its street essence and distances it from the spheres of consumption and normalization in which a good part of graphic art has fallen, including graffiti itself. , which today enters the soapy characteristic of Street Art, which has used permission and cultural validation to evolve, according to YAST.
“Since I started I knew what I wanted: for my looks to look really shabby (uncomfortable, disconcerting) and to be in attractive places.
I always had that clarity and I didn't hesitate about it.
I like illegality because it hides things and the imagination of those who see the pieces flies.
Or not seeing how it is, it is freer let's say.
I have had to be with the people who say in front of me 'who painted there, who goes up to do that.
I wasn't there before.
Or they don't understand anything when they see it and that for me is better, that it continues to exist for the sake of existing, that gives it magic or flavor”, considers the author.
Few pieces in spaced times give different results.
“The city is my gallery”
For YAST, who prefers not to go up to the same place where he has already painted and erased it since it no longer finds it exciting, he is especially concerned about existing, standing out in a particular way, but above all being part of his city, which welcomes and loves special shape.
And despite the fact that he has considered embarking on a formal path as an artist and recently participated with an independent art gallery (a runaway experience), YAST has discarded this ecosystem with a clear objective: to exist and be part of the time and space that lives, breathes and inhabits, with all its vices and virtues.
“I love my city and I want to be part of it.
We have to exist in this city, not be others.
I am a dog leg [nomad, someone in constant movement] and the city is very big, and despite the fact that more and more people know me because I already paint more in busy places, I still have a lot of city to intervene.
At first I had the idea of developing my work more towards art, I felt I had a special talent, but at that time I still did not have a more solid dialogue with the aesthetics of the street.
Between my work and my lifestyle I paint when and how I want”.
However, that freedom that YAST speaks of does not exclude the discipline and commitment that the author has with his work, recognizing that despite the enjoyment and certain 'ease' of execution that his action offers him, it also demands a notable degree of complexity and investment on a physical and creative level.
“For example, the first year of the pandemic was my best year because there were no people, the police hardly ever came by.
I aim to make a pint or two a month and that year I averaged two a month.
But it is exhausting because it involves going, getting on, painting all night and the next day resting.
Right now it's a bit difficult for me to maintain this character, because more and more people are coming for it.
Being nothing to being something does change and it is heavy.
As I say: the character sues because it is a responsibility of being.
But the fact that people see it makes me happy and I do it because it's something that makes me feel alive, while I'm at it I don't think about anything other than the piece, even as therapy, I like it and I enjoy it.
It's not hard for me”, confesses YAST.
Given the growth in terms of the scope and echo of his work within the ecosystem that he places as "graffiti of the future" or post graffiti [some voices also call it NO Graffiti], YAST is diaphanous and punctual about the reason for being and the future. of his always vital, free and street work.
“I have always liked to be a reference.
And I saw the most outstanding of my generation and I didn't want to be like them, but I wanted to be at that level of presence.
I see my evolution as going to other cities and painting.
That would be the next step: France, Madrid, Russia or Japan, where the degree of penalty influences the style of the pints.
I don't want to reach the artistic field, there is no gallery or museum.
My gallery is the street, I have lived in Zacatecas (where they believed that their paintings were satanic) and in Los Cabos;
they are places that do not compare with the chaos of the city.
“It's about reflecting who you are.
I feel part of my generation, which shares certain interests and that is important to me: the festivals or events that I go to, sometimes I feel that in the future they may no longer be possible and they are stimuli of who we are.
This vibe of getting up on a rooftop and doing what I do also gives you some perspective that what you want can be done.
There the message is clear to others, because when someone sees the pints they can read: Dare, do it.
You also can.
Let go!