Victoria Graffiti

It was evening, and the light was not favorable. I had my phone on me but not a camera. But just as they say the best camera is the one that you have, the best light is the one that you have also. It was impossible to pass an unusual adornment of the city space in the town of Victoria, Texas: clusters of girls replicated along a wide bare wall.

My son seemed to be as thrilled as I was. He froze for a moment in front of the wall as if we were transported into a museum. Graffiti appeared to be art woven into the texture of everydayness, even if a controversial art existing between assault of the public tastes, vandalism, and high culture, whatever that means. 

We carefully examined girls in mackintoshes and girls in white dresses. They all looked alike, spooky twins of the artist's imagination. They marched somewhere with bombs and bottles of what appeared to be poison (an obvious Alice-in-Wonderland reference), and they were connected with patterns of arrows and rainbows. Girls' lonely, lovely faces appeared in the sky surrounded by bursts of magenta hearts.

Despite that the figures were replicated, there was a significant variability. Some of the girls sent rainbow rays out of their eyes or mouths, and some of them sat at a lotus in the sky, evidently meditating.

Familiar and inevitable signs Customer Parking Only had the name of the business blanked-out. It seemed like the signs and the exit of the ventilating trunk (?), as well as yellow marks defining the parking spots on the ground, participated in the work of art and in the organizing of the urban space in equal measure. The mural left a weird sense of something going on not quite graspable in the town of Victoria. The mural was a manifestation of something that to what I did not quite have words.