Why so long in the tooth? After losing 10 friends “in a series of freak accidents,” a Danse Macabre sensibility has gripped London-based, veteran graffiti writer Sweet Toof. In Dark Horse, his first solo show in the U.S., Sweet Toof invades Bushwick’s Factory Fresh Gallery with his iconic swollen gums and pearly whites.
Approaching the gallery, a mural runs along the top of an adjoining building, spilling over into the gallery’s backyard. Sweet Toof’s familiar incisors continue onto the gallery walls, in the doorways’ trim and the paintings themselves. The pieces are populated by skeletons, decked out in patterned pants and stovepipe hats, equipped with brightly primed paint rollers to make their mark on society.
“Battle Of The Buff,” by Sweet Toof.
In “Giddy Up,” one of the larger canvases, a group of skeletal horsemen ride away from two Trojan Horses tagged with “Stoof” and “Fard.” Both rider and steed bare Sweet Toof’s maniacal mandibles, grinning in triumph over their latest conquests. A dark, billowing cloud hovers over the scene—or is it smoke from the cultural fires set by this cadaverous cadre of Cheshire cats?
A common criticism of street-cum-gallery artists is that reduced to a canvas, tags lose their inherently anti-establishment ethos, and come across more like photographs—a sort of handmade take on the genre of graffiti documentation. Sweet Toof’s energetic style and subject matter—which draws heavily on 17th-century European guild and Vanitas painting—captures graffiti’s confrontational spirit and translates it through metaphor and technique into a gallery setting.
Through May 22, Factory Fresh Gallery, 1053 Flushing Ave., Brooklyn, 917-682-6753.
