When graffiti is removed, a smooth wall rarely remains. For photographer Misha de Ridder, who is now exhibiting at Galerie Caroline O’Breen, the traces of erased art are a rewarding game between creation and destruction.

In the back room of Galerie Caroline O’Breen, green and turquoise spots can be seen on a video screen. Sometimes that image is cruelly disrupted by a caricatured piglet. He doesn’t look too happy. He appears on screen for a split second. Then he’s gone, only to return every now and then. It’s a kind of black-and-white afterimage that you also see in horror films – something that seems to burn into your retina.

Misha de Ridder searched for all sorts of places in the city where graffiti has been removed by the municipality or homeowners. What remains is rarely a smooth wall: the traces of the graffiti have been left behind, often even traces of graffiti that had already been removed. If you look closely at those walls, you will see a tangle of stains, layers of paint, scratches and cracks. And the wall itself also has a structure.

Cat and mouse game
De Ridder's short video is called Silent Poison and is actually a simple gif. De Ridder made a collection of fifty animated gifs, based on photos of erased graffiti.

De Ridder is interested in the eternal game between creation and destruction. Graffiti artists and cleaners are engaged in a constant game of cat and mouse to claim public space. De Ridder sits a bit in the gray area in between and captures the blotchy surface of that battle. The result explores the boundaries between abstract painting, photography and animation.

Holes and specks
The gifs can be purchased as digital artwork (non-fungible token). Every time an artwork is traded, it changes. First, the animation disappears, then the image becomes increasingly blurred, until only a blurry image remains. Collectors can have the image restored for a fee, or choose to exchange the digital artwork for a physical print.

In the front room, Galerie O’Breen presents a number of such physical prints, of seemingly vague, meaningless spots. That they are indeed super-sharp photos, of pieces of wall or advertising columns, you only see when you look closely at the print. De Ridder has captured meaningless surfaces in public space at an extremely high resolution, making details such as small holes, specks or hairline cracks along the edges of the paper visible.

The most beautiful is a photo of a dark surface that at first glance looks like a kind of blackboard. It turns out to be a box near the Waterlooplein, but is just like a kind of cosmic world, captured by the Hubble telescope. Unsuspecting passers-by walk past it every day, but De Ridder takes wonderful photos of it.