In my many conversations with PREF over the last year, what ultimately we speak about is letters. How to dismantle them, how to enhance them, how to make language and the letter more important, but also, how to evolve them. Graffiti artists are good at making language seem cryptic, unapproachable, indecipherable. But also they make letters the most important part of art. It’s a ying, and a yang.
PREF told me recently that language, especially in public space, is about giving you directions. Setting rules. Setting boundaries. Selling you something. As an artist and designer, he thinks there is more potential in letters, something personal and something universal. The shapes, the colors, the action; all important but also something that can be played with and manipulated.
In his new show, Life Sentences, this week at Start Gallery at Secret Walls in Los Angeles, the UK-born, LA-based artist has developed a series of paintings and ceramic sculptures that bend letter forms to their absolute maximum without them losing a character. He gives words personality.
I have a few thoughts on letters and the art of the letter. Lettering matters because it shapes how messages are seen, felt, and remembered. Thoughtful letterforms communicate tone, build identity, guide reading, and create emotional and functional connections between words and people. If you are in advertising or design, lettering turns text from mere information into an experience—clarifying meaning, strengthening personality, improving readability, and making messages more persuasive and memorable. But when you are an artist, letters become malleable, a feeling, something you can push to the limits. I love this dichotomy.
PREF looks at the way letters move through our lives and captures a certain spirit and power. There is a certain way in which he reinvigorates text and letters in a world where language has been shortened and manipulated. He gives it new life. —Evan Pricco
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