DScreet – Words Up

Acid-eyed flourescent owls have been roosting around London, night and day, for the last six years or so. Like their more conventional rural cousins, these DScreet painted urban owls can be harder to spot in the daytime, specially when shutters go up.

A lucky tangential glance might catch them on vans alongside Burning Candy and ATG types

When a guy is getting up on walls with the likes of Burning Candy, Kid Acne, and SEKS then you know that a serious talent is afoot.

DScreet can mix it up a bit wildstyle with the letters on the street, as seen here

A rubble filled basement (that’s the crowd – the floor has quite a few loose bricks too) houses DScreet’s first ever gallery show and dayglo owls roost among DScreet’s other letterform art.

A curious feature of the owls is that they always present their left side, so one wonders what they are hiding on their right. They have the most intense 1000 yard stares and sabre-toothed hair-does and, whether they are the cute little baby ones or the big burly adult bastards, they are always armed with “shake-hands-at-your-peril” talons.

Four caged owls hang from beams in the basement space, their dayglo fur actually subdued in comparison to their radioactive eyes which dare you to engage in a retina burnout staring match.

In case the colours are too muted for anyone, DScreet has done one owl in twinkling blue and pink neon light, though for added effect the colour of the eyes manage to cycle through yellow when warming up.

One pair of owls is done as an embroidery piece which the label proudly proclaims to be made of 67,000 beads. That this fact is known is the scariest thing about this one, though the eyes on these owls are gorgeous. Excuse the pic, the rough aesthetic in the Pure Evil dungeon never lends itself to subtle lighting.

About half of the works on show are word pieces rendered in a blocky style with a jarring crash of colour reliefs. The irregularity of the 3D effects on the words ignores the generally accepted rules of the form.

Like So Many Strange Gods

The effect of the letter shapes and most particularly the colour combinations challenges the observer to ponder if there is some truly kinked inner pallette in DScreet’s mind. There are amusing details not to be missed, check the hara kiri letter O at the end of this piece.

That the irregular shading and inconsistent 3D effects are DScreet’s intentional distortion of the form may be supposed from the words themselves and the titles, most notably this Men Crazed With Shadows.

More twit-twoo from the show can be seen here.