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For one week only, SWEET TOOF the anonymous face that launched a thousand teeth unleashes the beast and charges forward once again with a new major solo show SWEET REVENGE — with a fleet of new works and an army of horsemen braced to paint the East End red.
It’s a call to arms in the battle for free expression: join forces or else just grin and bear it.
Having chewed up the streets of London’s East End, Sweet Toof takes a bite out of Hackney Wick again with his mini retrospective exhibition Sweet Revenge. The show includes a new series of original works plus artwork never seen in the UK before.
Sweet Toof has risen up the ranks as a graffiti artist throughout the 80s and 90s, where his letter-forms and street styles have evolved alongside a rigorous academic practice as a realist painter and sculptor.
Heavily influenced by the Vanitas paintings of 16th century Europe, Mexican Day of the Dead, Subway Art and the underground comics of Vaughn Bodé, his characteristic gummy chompers are a true fusion of street and studio art.
Now the anonymous face that launched a thousand teeth unleashes the beast and charges forward once again — with a fleet of new works and an army of horsemen braced to paint the East End by storm.
Of all the parts of the body, teeth, crammed into the mouth cave, are a constant reminder that we are merely flesh hanging out to dry on an elaborate chain of bone linkages.
The pulpy ripped swollen scarlet and pink flesh that we call the gums, barely tolerate their border-line function as a visual testament to life and death. The mouth itself is in constant crisis. It is the place where stuttering words come forth, where words are taken back, where ‘sweet’ foods begin their rot.
Francis Bacon understood that the mouth is at once entrance and exodus. When we scream we also breathe. In order to exhale we must inhale. For Sweet Toof this sway between horror and acceptance is an important part of his work.
Sweet Toof’s painting starts with and evolves out of his street art; whether as a solo graffiti artist or in collaboration with others. Typical tags, throw-ups, and more elaborate pieces become a whole language which informs his studio works.
Like the streets of 1980’s New York, London’s streets today are being reclaimed by an ever-increasing army of street artists of which Sweet Toof is one of the most prolific and artful.
Out there, under the swirl of lamplights, billboards and urban detritus, ‘bubble-Gums’ and pearly-Teeth’ push themselves up through the pavement cracks and concrete facades like anarchic plants refusing the flimsy, rootless, cheap order of modern life.
If the 16th century Northern European tradition of painting Vanitas was still there to remind us of the transience and the hopeless vanity of life, then Sweet Toof’s skulls and teeth continue that tradition but add in a more Mexican view-point where if one accepts death then one can also honour and celebrate it and use it as part of the life blood trip. Or in Sweet Toof’s words: “To get one’s teeth into things, before it’s too late.”