BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
TRIPL a.k.a. Furious. Repainting Subway Art. Ruyzdael Publishing. The Netherlands, 2024.
Reprinted from the original review.
Before opening this book, try to imagine what it would take for one artist to recreate a publication so deeply embedded in graffiti culture that it has been called its Bible. Talent and painting skills are only the beginning. Add discipline, logistics, nerve, physical stamina, photography, styling, train knowledge, and an almost unreasonable willingness to keep going. That is essentially what Dutch graffiti writer TRIPL, a.k.a. FURIOUS, set out to do with Repainting Subway Art: recreate all 239 works pictured in Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s Subway Art, then reconstruct the photographs, situations, and ultimately the book itself. What began as a joke among friends developed into a project that consumed roughly a decade.
Published in 1984, Cooper and Chalfant’s Subway Art became one of graffiti’s defining documents. Its influence traveled far beyond New York, introducing generations of young writers to painted subway trains, letter construction, names, characters, techniques, and an entire culture that many readers had never encountered firsthand. Copies were carried in backpacks, studied until the bindings failed, photocopied, shared, and — according to persistent graffiti lore — sometimes liberated from bookstores and libraries. Dutch author and researcher Daniël de Jongh titled his 2024 Nuart Journal review of TRIPL’s project “A Reincarnation of the Bible of Graffiti in Slow Motion,” which gets close to the peculiar devotion at work here.
Recreating, however, is not simply copying. TRIPL did not select a few famous pieces and repaint them in his own style. He took on the entire proposition, primarily using Dutch and other European trains while adapting the original compositions to different rolling stock. The original writers’ works became the structure for new versions, with TRIPL working through their proportions, gestures, colors, characters, jokes, and letterforms while introducing his own names and substitutions. Each completed page became another piece in an enormous puzzle.
The painting was only part of it. TRIPL also reconstructed the photographic world surrounding the trains: angles, poses, close-ups, portraits, action shots, clothing, passengers, backgrounds, and other details that gave Cooper and Chalfant’s original images their character. He styled and staged scenes, stepped into different roles, found props, and recreated circumstances that had occurred four decades earlier on another continent. One of the most difficult was DONDI’s whole car, for which Cooper had photographed both the painting process and the completed train in motion. TRIPL had to reproduce not only the piece but the circumstances of the photographs themselves.
Text: Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo Photos: Diana Paun
Title: Repainting Subway Art. TRIPL a.k.a. FURIOUS
Published: Ruyzdael Publishing. The Netherlands, 2024.
Author: TRIPL a.k.a. FURIOUS, Dr. Edward Birzin, Mikel van den Boogaard
Language: English
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