Urban Mistura by Sfhir

Some curricula seem to be built around academic awards, not the case of Sfhir. Fascinated by the drawing since he was a child, his start in graffiti goes back to 1995 when he was fourteen years old and got expelled from school because he was found painting with spray paint. Once he got readmitted to class, his art teacher imposed a paradoxical sanction: he urges him to repeat the work, this time on the wall of the institute and with the approval of the school director. The mystique of the forbidden and the Art as a vehicle of free expression will be the only pattern that will guide him to channel his inquisitiveness. Making a synoptic outline of his work is practically impossible: Fernando Sánchez Dragó defined it as "striking, acid and hyper-realistic, of debatable aesthetics, like everything, and controversy -forming; Sfhir is a graffiti artist, urban artist, muralist, three-dimensional, experimentalist and many other -isms." In his works, he combines graffiti with varied tools such as airbrushes, spray guns, brushes, or rollers. Art exploration is the key to its evolution; far from being confined in concrete artistic labels, each new project is a break-up and new learning. Works made exclusively using pen on paper (Boligraff), the use of mixed techniques, fire on wood (More wood, Animas ...) or ephemeral illustrations made with laser pointers that fade away, agonizing, while being created in a literary game (Lumen) are just some examples of the diversity that covers Sfhir’s works. He made the short film "Brut Nature" as a scriptwriter and illustrator. Constantly researching, he has experimented with multiple techniques, chiseling every detail in a laborious, almost obsessive way, to achieve the crudest hyperrealism, dissect the reality and capture it in a graphic, overwhelming way, through an acid filter and, sometimes, bleeding. Varied themes and a common element in all his works: disturbing realities. A sentence written on a New York train left him marked forever: "I only know that I can’t stop."