SKE (Eliezer Pagán) by Manuel Álvarez Lezama:
SKE — the moniker used for decades by Eliezer Pagán, one of Puerto Rico’s most prominent urban artists and an internationally-recognized figure since the late 1990s — can be located among the graffiti artists who, like Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, moved from ephemerally stamping their art in controversial public spaces to use different supports that allow their work to be exhibited in galleries and museums.
SKE (pronounced Skí) was born in 1971 in a proletarian neighborhood within a municipality of Metro San Juan, and since the age of 10, as a public-school student who signed JOKER, was unable to subdue his desire/mission to draw and write his name on any available surface, be it the classroom or on neighborhood walls. But that child was not to stop at the odious phase of just “tagging” his name anywhere he could, because he possessed one of the most important qualities for an artist who wants to grow and stand out: to approach those who can teach him, and to learn from them —in his case, from the discourse of hip-hop, which was gathering force, to friends with similar interests who gave him books that introduced him to “big league” graffiti, to intelligent and transcendent urban mural art. And it is with this drive that SKE developed into a unique chronicler of Puerto Rican society, one who has achieved a refined and dramatic synthesis of Puerto Rican urban art and the canons of both Modernism and Postmodernity.
Early on in his career, having realized the importance of aesthetics and the power of his work’s message, SKE set out on an experimentation “journey” through everything that relates to urban art. Key in this process was ROM (Efraín Colón) an older graffiti artist, experienced and bohemian, who introduced him to much more sophisticated techniques and the themes of “serious” graffiti. At the age of 20, in 1991, SOZE, a childhood friend then living in The Bronx in New York City, invited him to visit the graffiti capital of the world, where a universe of possibilities opened for him.
A few weeks after arriving in New York, SKE joined the well known, international FX Crew, establishing himself as someone whose discourse was extremely suggestive in its depth and possible readings. His work was to immediately establish a dialog with some of the most recognized young urban artists of the United States, and, through the Internet or specialized publications like The Source, he gained worldwide renown; over time, he would be invited to “tag” live in several US cities as well as in Italy, Brazil, and Japan.
What came after that was a well-deserved protagonist role in the history of Puerto Rican graffiti. His complex and bold monumental murals established him as a prodigious and powerful urban poet, capable of combining dissimilar images to create forceful metaphors that summarize many of the socio-economic and political issues that define his existential reality.
In recent years, and with the same passion that drove his public “tagging,” SKE decided to bring his work to new and more accepted supports, which helped him achieve a significant presence in more traditional artistic circuits. And this new facet worked perfectly for him, because, despite being self-taught, his historical knowledge of art is impressive and is reflected both in his urban art and in his new paintings.
(From ArtNexus)
