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Rylsee's new monograph "How to Play with Letters" available at Urban Spree

  • Aug 22, 2017
In parallel with his solo show "Other Inbox" at Urban Spree Galerie until Sunday 03.09.2017, the Swiss-born and Urban Spree-based artist Rylsee has just published a new book with Moleskine in Milan. His first monograph, "How to Play with Letters" is a tour de force in modern typography, illustrating his past 5 years in Berlin with playful, witty & catchy lettering experiments. For Rylsee, after stations in Geneva and Vancouver, Berlin marked a shift away from his early illustration days to a focus on designing, polishing and scratching letters, a field which is the main focus of this book. Rooted in graffiti and skateboarding, infused by hiphop, Rylsee’s universe is cool fantasy supplemented by a sharp sense of composition and balance. His notorious sketchbooks reveal his everyday practice of finding catchy sentences and creating new styles and fonts where letters - unlike the classical art of calligraphy - become glitchy, virused, and melt, albeit always irresistible and funny. This distorted universe or « dystorpic » as Rylsee would put it – exists by the will of a typographer who blurs the lines of reality and create his own calligraphic spell. Rylsee recycles his everyday experiences and thoughts and turn them into proverbial low-fi sentences such as « Never trust someone who doesn’t like pizza », « I wish you could be as cute as your profile picture » or « Too shy to rap » to name but a few. Using only his drawing skills, Rylsee becomes the modern alchemist, plotting numerous optical illusions in 2D to make them look like native 3D. In Rylsee’s universe, 2D and 3D coalesce, but the craftsman, the pen, and the illusion maker takes the lead.   Urban Spree Bookshop in Berlin has signed copies of the book. Signed copies can also be ordered online on our webshop.
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