Wonderwalls: Valencia street artist Escif's been adorning crumbling surfaces with his inky figures

Valencia street artist Escif has been transforming walls in all sorts of places, adding his figures, motifs, and commentary to surfaces and scales from Spain and Poland to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Much of his work has a beautiful ink-made, manuscript quality, which pleasantly jars with the open-air context, and yet draws attention to the similarities between that crumbling sand-coloured masonry and the fragile parchments on which such styles are found.

The scale of Escif’s work often requires scaffolding as well as spray-paint, and the content frequently appears to involve commentary on the repressing, ordering aspects of contemporary urban space and society. They sometimes feature uniform, stuporous figures destined to sink or plummet, whose revolutionary counterparts break through barriers and emphasise commonly accepted suppressions of self-expression. A fan of Picasso and Felix Gonzales-Torres alike, Escif’s work combines skillful graphic illustration with equally skilled, varied, and thought-provoking social commentary.