Erased Kaws ad disruption

Paul Stephenson is doing some art Defacing… see more artworks by Paul here. He has an interesting artist statement:

This form of painting is called Sous Rature. Instead of using a blank canvas I take original artwork (not prints or multiples) created by other artists and erase parts of them. The result is destructive and creative, a forced collaboration, iconoclasm; image breaking in the literal sense and graffiti in that ‘what constitutes graffiti is neither the inscription nor its message but the wall, the background, the surface; it is because the background exists fully as an object that has already lived, that such writing always comes as an enigmatic surplus, that is what disturbs the order of things’.

The subject of the painting is given significance by its absence. It was a painting, now it is a painting.