Against Overlapping

“Against Overlapping” is the last piece of a triptych on abstract painting located on Clevischer Ring n Köln-Mülheim. In 2015 the gallery was established as part of the CityLeaks Urban Art Festival Cologne. The artist Hense (US) and Chu (ARG) produced the first two murals. Elian Chali compliments the series then in 2017 as part of TRANSURBAN.
The massive painting shows the primary colours and black & white which are divided into monochrome swatches. Forms, structures and gradients are absent. The coloured fields extend on two facades of the building. At their borders they build a fluid contrast to each other. The calming composition and bright colours of the piece contrast to the noise and movement of the busy street below. The building is part of a high density housing complex, in which the architecture is alike. The works of Chali, Chu and Hense break open the conformity of the architecture and its monochrome design.

Elian Chali about his work:
“The main idea of the piece was to not force the neighbor into a specific moment of interpretation, but to ignore the idea of masterpiece and get confused with other possibilities. The main tool was to not generate a complex composition, without author features; searching for the harmony instead of protagonism, trying to balance it with the monumental scale.
I think that when you work on a neighborhood that already has very strong cultural characteristics, you must observed what it takes to give a point of view in the environment, instead of impose a way to make things. A big intervention may seem like a spaceship that came to force a daily life situation that in some point it end to use up.”