30th MESS 1989

Branko Bačanović made '30th MESS' as a poster, and the process looks like a kind of screen printing with stencils. It reminds me of making posters for bands when I was younger. The way the colors are laid down, it feels like the paper was almost scrubbed with ink, a textural mark that suggests the artist really manhandled the materials. There’s this tension between the graphic shapes and the roughness of the application, especially in the spiraling, galaxy-esque forms. The yellow stars feel playful against this ground, but the forms themselves are not quite perfect, and this adds to the hand-made quality. It's like seeing Kurt Schwitters or the more pop-oriented works by Dieter Roth doing poster design – art that has roots in the everyday, but manages to blast off into something cosmic. Art is a conversation, and this piece speaks volumes without saying a word.