On Loch Street in Aberdeen, a burst of colour now cuts through the city’s familiar granite grey. Painted as part of Nuart Aberdeen’s 2026 festival, Poetry is in the Streets, the new mural from London artist Remi Rough is a dynamic addition. Intersecting planes of colour, sharp geometry and flowing movement combine in a composition that seems to shift depending on where you stand.
At first glance, the work appears entirely abstract. Yet beneath the surface lies a direct connection to the written word and to the graffiti culture from which Rough first emerged. It is perhaps why his contribution feels so at home within this year’s festival theme. Whilst many artists explored poetry through text, language and direct intervention, Rough’s mural approaches it from another direction altogether. Here the language becomes purely visual.
From Style Writing to Abstraction
Long before large-scale murals and international exhibitions, Remi Rough was a graffiti writer. Beginning in 1984, he immersed himself in what he still prefers to call style writing. This was the art of manipulating and transforming letterforms into increasingly expressive and complex compositions.
Like many artists of his generation, his introduction came through Subway Art, the influential book documenting the painted trains of New York. A copy found its way into his school and opened a window onto a culture that immediately captured his imagination.
Over time those letterforms began to stretch and evolve. During the early 2000s Rough stripped his work back, reducing letters to their essential forms before fragmenting and abstracting them further. What remained were the building blocks of style; movement, rhythm, balance and flow.
“I still paint letters, but the language has changed,” he explains. “The language that I used to communicate, I didn’t have enough tools within style writing to say what I wanted to say. So the work had to develop with the ideas that I had.”
The result is a body of work that often feels architectural in nature whilst still retaining traces of its graffiti origins. It is abstraction, but abstraction with a memory of writing embedded within it.
Interview with Remi Rough
Community and Belonging
Whilst the artwork itself provided the initial attraction, it was the culture surrounding graffiti that ultimately kept Rough involved.
By the mid-1980s hip-hop culture had arrived in Britain as a complete package, bringing music, breaking, style and graffiti with it. For Rough, however, the strongest pull came from the sense of community that surrounded the scene.
Reflecting on those early years, he recalls a period when opportunities for young people in London felt increasingly limited. Youth clubs were disappearing, funding was scarce and creative outlets were often hard to find. Graffiti offered something different. It provided a place to belong.
“The community around graffiti and the other people doing it really attracted me,” he says. “It was something to be a part of, something to be part of a community.”
A Perfect Fit for Poetry is in the Streets
The 2026 edition of Nuart Aberdeen explored the relationship between language and public space. Across the city artists introduced poetry, text and written interventions into the urban environment. Yet language can take many forms.
In our coverage of the festival, Inspiring City described Rough’s work as representing a journey from letters to image. Whilst other artists brought poetry directly onto the streets. Rough’s mural demonstrates how writing itself can become visual, transformed through repetition, rhythm and abstraction.
His mural therefore sits comfortably within the wider festival narrative. It may not contain words, but it is rooted in the same ideas of communication, expression and interpretation that define poetry itself.
The Ikonoklast Influence
A pivotal moment in Rough’s artistic development came through his involvement with the Ikonoklast Movement. Formed in 1989 by Juice 126, the collective brought together artists from across the UK who shared a desire to challenge the conventions of traditional graffiti.
Writers travelled from London, York, Manchester, Birmingham, Wales and Scotland, meeting regularly at events around the country. Birmingham became a particular hub through a creative space in Selly Oak. Organised by Juice, it was a place where experimentation was encouraged and artistic boundaries were pushed.
For Rough, what emerged was far more than a crew.
“It just became this family because we all felt really free to work the way we wanted to work,” he recalls. “It was like jazz, it was like painting jazz.”
The movement would prove hugely influential, helping to shape the evolution of British post-graffiti culture and laying the foundations for many of the approaches seen in public art today.
Future Language of the Ikonoklast
The story of that movement has recently been documented in Future Language of the Ikonoklast, a major publication authored by Remi Rough and published by Velocity Press.
The book grew out of an exhibition curated by Rough and fellow Ikonoklast member Part2 in 2024. What began as plans for a simple catalogue soon evolved into something much larger as artists began uncovering decades of photographs, sketches and archive material.
“We just realised we had so much stuff,” says Rough. “So we just thought this needs to be a book.”
The publication captures a significant chapter in British graffiti history whilst also demonstrating how many of the ideas explored by the Ikonoklasts continue to resonate today. For visitors encountering Rough’s mural in Aberdeen, it provides valuable context for understanding the creative journey that led to works such as this.
Colour Against the Granite
Aberdeen’s architecture played an important role in shaping the mural. Known as the Granite City, much of its character comes from the distinctive grey stone that dominates the streetscape.
Rough deliberately responded to that environment by embracing colour. The mural’s intersecting forms echo the structure and geometry of the surrounding city whilst simultaneously disrupting it. Bright gradients cut across the wall, creating a sense of motion that contrasts sharply with the solidity of the architecture around it.
Yet beneath the abstraction remains the mindset of a graffiti writer. Speaking about the mural, Rough jokes that he arrived in Aberdeen with a simple ambition: “I came here to burn everyone.” In graffiti terminology, that means creating the best piece, being the king!
At 54, he remains one of a relatively small number of artists from his generation still regularly producing murals on such a large scale. The competitive energy and creative ambition that first drew him into graffiti culture continues to fuel his work today.
A Legacy Written in Colour
For more than forty years Remi Rough has continued to push the possibilities of what graffiti-derived art can become. As a leading figure within both the post-graffiti and graffuturism movements, his work has helped expand the conversation around abstraction in public space.
Yet for all its ambition, the Aberdeen mural ultimately belongs to the city itself.
Reflecting on the nature of public art, Rough believes that murals take on new lives once completed. They become landmarks, meeting points and familiar parts of daily journeys. Gradually they are absorbed into the identity of the places they inhabit.
“It’s not mine anymore, it’s theirs,” he says. “It will become part of the fabric of the city.”
His mural on Loch Street now joins Aberdeen’s growing collection of public art. Rooted in the traditions of style writing yet speaking a language entirely its own, it stands as a vibrant contribution to a festival dedicated to the many forms that poetry can take.
Within a city of granite, it is a visual poem written in colour.
Remi Rough was interviewed on 23 April 2026 as part of the Nuart Aberdeen ‘Poetry is in the Street’s Festival. His book the ‘Future Language of the Ikonoklast‘ is published by and can be bought from Velocity Press.
For more Inspiring City articles you will like, take a look at…
- Poetry is in the Streets: All the artwork from Nuart Aberdeen 2026
- Remi Rough Murals in Stratford and Dulwich
- The outdoor street art gallery of Dulwich
- The Evolution of Art, when the Street Meets the Gallery
- Interview with Ingrid Beazley – Founder of the Dulwich Outdoor Gallery
- The Graffiti ‘Bible’ – How Subway Art Shaped a Generation
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