The PPOW Tribeca Gallery, which features the work of Chris Ellis, is around the corner from the old Mudd Club space, which served as the clubhouse for New York City’s demimonde in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Graffiti writers from the uptown and suburbs mingled with customs from the art world, and Keith Haring was in charge of his fourth-floor gallery. It was where Ellis, who began tagging trains as Daze in 1976, first showed his indoor studio work, a piece he created with Jean-Michel Basquiat for the 1981 show “Beyond Words,” curated by Leonard McGurr (aka. as Futura) and Fred Brathwaite (aka Fab 5 Freddy).
“The Mudd Club was the first place I ever sold a piece of art,” Ellis said recently on PPOW, his graying curls peeking out from under a knit cap. “This impromptu collaboration with Jean-Michel, where we both glued this newsprint on and Rene Ricard bought it. I think I got $50 for that, so I was happy.”
That New York version—of artistic production backed by cheap rent and creative indulgence—can feel very far away. A plaque marks the spot where the Mudd Club once stood; there is a boutique hotel nearby, the sleek lobby lit by designer lamps. Ellis’ exhibit at PPOW, “Give It All You Got,” on display through February 12, attempts to bridge that fertile time in the city’s history and its current iteration: richer, pandemic inflected, and more atomized. It brings together pieces from Ellis’ 40-year studio practice with new paintings that are both sad and elated. In a clash of figurative precision and emotional abstraction, they glorify the artist’s friends and contemporaries, many of whom have died, but also a sense of wonder that has been tempered, if not completely gone, by a life in the city.
“A Memorial” (2020), for example, shows a train tunnel shrouded in ice-blue darkness, a construction of the one Ellis spent countless hours in. He has applied the tags of writers he knows to the walls and sides of a subway car. For writers, the visual representation of one’s name is sacred currency, and Ellis renders each in the creator’s precise style, an endearing devotional act. They largely represent first- and second-generation graffiti writers — Dondi, DON1, IZ, NIC 707, Phase 2. “Each of these guys had their own story to tell,” he said.
The tunnel scene rises into a waxy field of bright green and vaporous pink, as if leaving the earth plane for something heavenly. The canvas is topped by a serious-looking gas mask – Ellis’s own – that hangs over it like a halo. Ellis, 59, was one of the few graffiti writers to use a gas mask when using aerosol paint, which could still contain lead in the 1980s. He credits it with saving his life. It is a memento mori, the canvas laden with the specter of death but also of redemption, ideas that go hand in hand for the graffiti artist; art is both a source of danger and a lifeline at the same time.
His other recent work continues in this mode: realistic, sober depictions of subway stations or the interiors of train cars that dissolve in dripping splashes and intense bursts of color. They discuss Ellis’s split consciousness, his studio practice and his train days. In some, massive letters spelling “DAZE” sneak up, interrupting the plane (As with other writers, Ellis’ nom de graf has no special meaning; he just chose the letters he could represent best.)
Along with artists such as Futura, Zephyr, John “Crash” Matos, Lee Quiñones and others, Ellis is one of the surviving members of a group of figures who gained recognition at the time for their innovations in aerosol art, a decidedly American expressionism that valued agility and bravado and eventually became a movement with global reach. The wavy lines and splashy strokes in Ellis’ latest work are reminiscent of the muscular gestures of abstract expressionism and a reminder that style writing is a form of action painting.
“It took over my whole life very quickly,” Ellis said. Born in Brooklyn, he grew up in Crown Heights and began painting trains in 1976 while enrolled at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. “I spent a lot of time sketching and drawing and hanging out at train stations for hours on end photographing pieces that went by,” he said. “I knew I was creative. I didn’t know I called subway painting.”
By the early 1980s, Ellis had transitioned into a studio practice that translated the energy of the moment. 1984’s Untitled (City) shows a crowded club scene, a Reginald Marsh-esque crush of punks and poets and people just trying new personas like you would a fez, like a figure in a lower angle does.
“This would have been the scene in Danceteria of Area, this strange mixture of all these different characters from all walks of life,” he said. “I was part of that too.” Nightclubs provided space for experimentation and showed work that established galleries were less enthusiastic about. Ellis recalls an evening at the Mudd Club when Basquiat handed him a new copy of “Beat Bop,” his spacious, panoramic record featuring Rammellzee and K-Rob. Today it is considered a blueprint of modern hip-hop.
“I feel like when you read about the history of what happened then, it seems like these events could have happened in 20 years, but it was only a few years. Every week there was something to experience that you did not want to miss.”
Much of the new work evokes Ellis’ sons Indigo and Hudson, 9 and 12. They provide the models for two life-size resin sculptures, as well as the figures in “The Explorers” (2021), an expansive painting of a rail yard, a site from Mr. Ellis sewn and now marked with tributes (one side shows the front of Blade’s “Dancin’ Lady” train, an early influence). The site is both indelibly the Bronx and not; the yard and trains are emitting a numinous ultramarine and violet signal that this is some kind of paranormal haven. “It’s not so important to me to have a specific representation of a place, it’s more like recognizing it, but not really,” Ellis said. Honey-like light shines from the windows of an apartment.
In its desire to provide a corrective portrait of a misunderstood place, “The Explorers” has an affinity with an older work, “Reflections in a Golden Eye”, from 1992, also on display, a pastoral toile of everyday street life in the Bronx – the botanic, the mother and child, stoop, the subway – accompanied by a Rauschenbergian construction of studio scraps: a mousetrap, a T-shirt silkscreen, a “Danger” sign. “My studio has been in the Bronx for decades. I always loved being there. Where there are a lot of negative connotations about the Bronx, I always saw the positive.”
When Ellis started making paintings, he was not yet in his own studio. He painted on roofs or in corners loaned out by friends. “Reflections in a Golden Eye” is one of the first artworks Mr. Ellis created in his own space, and it showcases an artist expanding both formally and metaphorically, as well as the way artists of his generation diffuse source material in hybridized forms, such as cartographers redrawing the shape of the city in real time.
In recent years there has been a renewed interest in this art period: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exhibition ‘Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation’ from 2020; “Beyond the Streets,” in 2019, and “Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977-1987” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts that same year (Ellis’s work featured in both). Work by Futura and Mr. Quiñones has been the subject of recent gallery shows, as well as Rammellzee’s oracle work, which Red Bull Arts researched in 2018. Jeffrey Deitch recently announced his representation of the Rammellzee estate.
“At one point I felt like it was being swept under the rug,” Ellis said. “I like that people try to fill in the blanks about what they didn’t know.” He reduced this to a combination of nostalgia and enlightening hindsight, but also has no interest in settling in.
“I don’t want to be stuck in a certain era. You cannot recreate a period that no longer exists. The generation that is emerging now will be influenced by things like social media, the immediacy of being able to see something right away. It’s not word of mouth anymore, but I believe there is still a community.”
A few months ago, Ellis visited McGurr at his studio in Red Hook after a long period of no contact. “When I first started, he was one of the people who let me use his studio to paint,” Ellis said. “We have a shared history. More recently I’ve done some projects with Pink and Crash. We don’t speak every day, we see each other maybe once a year,” he said. “But people are still developing.”
Chris Daze Ellis: Give everything you’ve got
Until Feb. 12, PPOW, 392 Broadway, TriBeCa; 212-647-1044; ppowgallery.com.