King of the Night

You see his stuff on walls and fences, down dark alleys and on quiet streets. They’re always the same, black, spray-painted body outlines, the kind drawn on the pavement at crime scenes where people have died.

Sometimes he puts words with the figures like “invisible darkness” or “the garden of lost things.” Sometimes there are two or three of the figures together, but mostly they’re alone, empty and ghostly things, without voice.

The guy who does them is a boyish 23-year-old who says he’s a cultural terrorist harassing old art forms with new symbols. They’re for kids, he says, and for the homeless and for people who don’t go to galleries.

He doesn’t care that his work is sometimes condemned as graffiti. He doesn’t care that he’s defacing private property. He doesn’t care that he’s shot at or chased sometimes or that cops look for him.

He says simply that art seeks its own canvas and the tantalizing emptiness of blank walls and open fences are his to adorn with body outlines.

He calls himself the Phantom because he paints only at night, although, unlike taggers, he never signs anything. During the day, he does what he must to get by, which is all he’d say about survival.

Not meant to be eternal, his work often only lasts as long as it takes to be painted over by an angry property owner or, in at least one case, collected by someone who removed boards of a fence to save it.

But he’s done hundreds throughout L.A., and if you look long enough you’re bound to spot one, as on Electric Avenue in Venice, where a seven-foot outline stares out from a blank wall like a hulking creature from another world.

“It’s a new image,” the painter explains grandly, “whose time has come.”

*

His first name is Joey. He doesn’t use his full name because people who paint on walls, by whatever name, are not held in high esteem.

Contrarily, he will tell you he has been glorified in publications such as the UCLA Daily Bruin and boasts that his figures have been used in music videos.

But perhaps his best moment is about to come, if fame is what he secretly desires. The king of the night is about to be legitimized by a real artist, one Gil Borgos, who is incorporating Joey’s body figures onto oversize canvases to tell the story of Venice.

It was through Borgos, a talented painter and waterfront character, that I first heard of Joey. Borgos is preparing half a dozen pieces to be displayed in a show next month that will celebrate his 70th birthday.

It will be at a restaurant called 72 Market Street, which is also its address in Venice. Borgos works there on weekends as a doorman in shorts and a cowboy hat.

He will call his show something like “Old Venice and New Symbols.” Joey’s things are the new symbols. Borgos began noticing the figures and decided to track down the painter to see if he could include them in his own work.

“He’s an artist with something to say and I’m intrigued by his work,” Borgos says of Joey’s body outlines. “Is he trying to wake up the world?” He shrugs. “Who knows?”

“I am an expression of self,” Joey says, sounding a little like one of his own esoteric messages. “I am in search of my culture.”

*

We met at the Rose Cafe, where he consumed two full breakfasts at my expense, explaining that he had to eat a lot when he could to compensate for the times he couldn’t eat at all.

He’s a slight, dark-haired young man, a contradiction of innocence and arrogance, the artist as urchin who spouts lofty fountains of meaning into whatever he does.

“I am the tip of everyone’s tongue,” he said between bites of eggs, hot cakes, potatoes, bacon, cheese and fruit, and gulps of hot tea and orange juice. “My figures are a mirror metaphor to the viewer’s own image. They are revelations.”

He was dressed in the modish attire of an English fop, clothing that he obtained through barter and from thrift shops, remaining silent about how else he might have gotten it. A hat was tipped rakishly to one side.

“My figures are temporal and easily destroyed,” he said. “But we’re a drive-by community. Why not drive-by art?”

Anti-graffiti laws do not apply to him, he says, because his work is not graffiti. “It is an art form,” he explains, “about myth, rumor and legend.”

Joey once painted with brushes on canvas, but when he could no longer afford the implements, the street became his canvas. Now all he has to buy is spray paint.

“I paint where art takes me,” he said that day at the Rose Cafe. “I work and let go. I neither own nor possess.”

Then he dug into his second breakfast.