BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
Rene Lerude & Alex Itin aren’t populists chasing the lowest common denominator with their hand-rendered one-off posters and stickers. As street artists, you might call them intellectual pranksters: observers who like their wisdom salted with cynicism, their philosophy dressed in humor, and their politics wrapped in that oily fish paper called irony. Look at the company they keep — literary heavyweights, satirists, philosophers, and contrarians. Instead of quoting hip-hop pioneers, political activists, or contemporary street philosophers, they platform Wilde, Bierce, Carlin, Vidal, and Burroughs onto that empty boarded-up lot you just trudged past.
Their words are colorfully tinted weapons, cutting through hypocrisy and mocking social pretensions. Their figures are caricature, maudlin, murky, and nearly masterfully messy. The style and understatement are of the moment, yet it carries a timeless skepticism — a stoic philosophy rooted in reason, rationality, and inquiry.
Popping up on the street often enough to grab your attention, the bards and seers they quote give you a good sense of where their heads are at: Oscar Wilde, Seneca, James Joyce, Junot Díaz, Laurence J. Peter, William S. Burroughs, T.H. Huxley, Francis Bacon, Ambrose Bierce, Gore Vidal, and George Carlin. It’s a crew of contrarians, cynics, and truth-tellers — a reminder that Rene & Alex are carrying these voices into the street not as decoration, but as conversation starters, provocations, and the occasional punchline.
Naturally, we had to talk with them, to see how they plug into the current street art scene and the fiercely independent energy of the artist-directed 17 Frost Gallery in Brooklyn that has been mounting shows by various curators over the last decade or more. That space has had more lives than a stray cat — raw, investigatory, and, when you least expect it, collaborative in a magpie sort of way. Are all the real artists today disillusioned, disgusted and absurdly darkly funny? Maybe. Or maybe every generation of free-thinkers has simply been awake, willing to poke at sore spots, willing to question conventional wisdom. With language that performs as much as it provokes, Rene & Alex show a respect for the long arc of human thought — always filtered through the grin of a trickster.
Brooklyn Street Art: When did you decide to collaborate with your art?
RENE: I started making stickers to put up in bars relating to alcohol, amusing insights, quips, etc. This was around 2016. I ran out of good ones fairly quickly, so this just opened up to any topic I found interesting. Originally, these were just markers on the white stickers. I then decided to make backgrounds that looked like surfaces I was working on — paint-splattered and marked from years of use. Essentially, an abstract mess. One late evening at the Frost Gallery, Alex saw a bunch which had room under the text and went to town. That was that.
ALEX: While curating at 17 Frost Gallery, I became inspired by the open-mic Sundays we were running that attracted mostly musicians and stand-up comedians, and the odd poet. I wondered if you could do a similar thing with visual artists, street artists, and graf people. We started doing Tuesday sticker nights. One could work on any media, but the sticker game was the unifying concept: low cost, popular, public, and open for low-stakes creative collaboration… but mostly it was an excuse to hang out and meet lots of like-minded artists.
One of the things I always like to talk with artists about is money — how to make it, keep it, shake it out of trees, etc. It’s an interesting thing as a bill is about the size of a sticker. Surviving as an artist is brutal stuff, so educating yourself and your community about legal and financial questions is just good practice.
“One of the things I always like to talk with artists about is money — how to make it, keep it, shake it out of trees, etc. Surviving as an artist is brutal stuff, so educating yourself and your community about legal and financial questions is just good practice.” — Alex
In one such conversation, I was ranting about music, copyright laws, and how people in a band get or don’t get paid. I said something like Miles Davis got paid, the band usually didn’t (unless they brought the song with them). And I think I pretended to be an angry bassist ranting about Miles. A friend walked in the door and announced with great authority that Miles Davis owes him money. That joke sort of stuck and Rene wrote down the quote, and I drew a trumpet. For a while, it was just “Miles Davis owes me money,” signed by any of his many collaborators. Eventually, we started looking for other quotes.
BSA: What’s your collaboration process? Do you pass the artwork back and forth, or do you work on it together in the studio?
RENE: I start the process by producing a couple of hundred stickers and posters from newsprint. Then comes the lengthy task of going through one of dozens of aphorism books and writing them all out. I pass this on to Alex and wait. He gives them back to me, I archive them, then we split them amongst ourselves.
“I see the country in a dangerous place, and positive bromides are not as important as anger and cogent analysis of our present state. So I wanted a bit of salt and burn… while still being funny.” — Alex
ALEX: The first collaborations were done together at 17 Frost, but eventually we were passing them back and forth in envelopes, often between London and New York.
BSA: How do you choose the spots in the street to place the final work?
RENE: If it’s a sticker, somewhere in the cut where it won’t get taken over, but still in decent reading distance. Posters just anywhere that might rock a while.
ALEX: Placement is for me just part of putting up stickers. It’s usually a walk and improvised art installation. I try to hug up to artists I like or to try and interact with text or image. Rene hangs most of the posters, so I’m not sure how he chooses spots for those.
BSA: Alex, do you draw the characters before or after the words are given to you by Words on the Street?
ALEX: Rene usually does the background and text, and I work into that.
BSA: Are the characters based on real humans? Are they portraits of people you know or see in public space?
ALEX: Some of the drawings are just cartoons with broad archetypes, but also there are a lot of portraits of the various quoted people. These are drawn from photos — a thing I never do in my own studio practice. There are also a lot of Trump portraits.
BSA: Rene, you use quotes from famous people, politicians, and literature. Do you sometimes write your own thoughts and use them in collaboration with Alex?
RENE: I have done a few myself, though I’ll check to make sure it hasn’t been said before — in as much as you can. Alex does more frequently than me, so we have done quite a few of those over the years.
ALEX: I have written a few quotes attributed to -itin. “Branding is for cattle” is a favorite.
BSA: Many times the messages and drawings are funny, salty, biting, and poignant. Is it hard to keep a balance when doing the art? Do you even think about keeping a balance?
ALEX: One of the things I was playing with was the overly positive, banal affirmation-type quotes you see in a lot of street art. I see the country in a dangerous place, and positive bromides are not as important as anger and cogent analysis of our present state. So I wanted a bit of salt and burn… while still being funny.
BSA: The current political atmosphere must be a bonanza for your creativity and productivity in your art. Do you feel overwhelmed by the dangerous path the country is going? If you feel angry at the current administration’s actions and policies, do you use your art to channel the anger?
RENE: Oddly enough I haven’t made any new posters or stickers in a couple years. Most quotes worth their salt are in some way timeless — vernacular can be different, but the sentiments always come to relevancy as time passes. That said, it’s come to a point where more of them are becoming relentlessly applicable as the weeks and months pass.
ALEX: The second term has created a quandary. I got okay at doing Trump, but I just don’t want to see his face or give any more attention to that narcissist. So it’s a quandary.
