With my ongoing fascination with cultural production in urban spaces, I came across Rafael Trelles’s IN CONCRETE: URBAN GRAPHICS 2004-2010 (L’Artban Contemporary Art, 2025) at the Museo de Arte de Ponce’s bookstore. What a treasure trove! (Yes, the store, too.) I prefer the title in Spanish—En concreto: Gráfica urbana—because of its broader meaning and connotations…, and that is the title of the documentary film on Trelles’s process and production of reverse graffiti. (MAPR, here I come…!)
This book is tantalizingly described by Antonio Martorell: “Using stencils that he himself designs, cuts out, and applies in modules so that all of us can walk on beauty, [Trelles] transforms the street into a carpet, a sidewalk into a starry trail, a patch of ground into a graphic vignette. As we step on it, we are lifted into an imaginary flight that takes us to territories as distant as that mythical Persian carpet of the One Thousand and One Nights would—designs that recall those tiles in old Puerto Rican houses, which in turn recall Andalucian tiles of Moorish lineage” (3). Indeed, the photographs and essays take us (on the wings of Trelles’s work) through the island and beyond, to Buenos Aires, Havana, Oporto & Alijó, Ponce, San Juan, Vieques…
Description (Reverse Graffiti by Rafael Trelles): In 2004, Trelles developed a street art technique using a pressure hose on walls, sidewalks, and other surfaces—a genre he calls urban graphic art. Today, this technique is known as reverse graffiti. From 2004 through 2010, Trelles worked nationally and internationally, creating public art with the reverse graffiti technique.
Drawing on diverse voices from Rafael Trelles’ projects and an art history essay by Andrew Wasserman, this publication is one of the few exploring the technique of reverse graffiti.
For more information, see https://www.rafaeltrellesart.com/projects
For purchasing information, see https://librerialaberintopr.com/collections/puerto-rico-ensayo/products/in-concrete-urban-graphics-2004-2010-andrew-wasserman-alicia-candiani-nelson-rivera-katherine-t-mccaffrey-roberto-otero-and-rafael-trelles
For information on the documentary, visit https://www.mapr.org/es/arte/obra/en-concreto-grafica-urbana-el-documental
With my ongoing fascination with cultural production in urban spaces, I came across Rafael Trelles’s IN CONCRETE: URBAN GRAPHICS 2004-2010 (L’Artban Contemporary Art, 2025) at the Museo de Arte de Ponce’s bookstore. What a treasure trove! (Yes, the store, too.) I prefer the title in Spanish—En concreto: Gráfica urbana—because of its broader meaning and connotations…, and