Artworks by Achille "Kende" Soardi

I work with calligraphy as a painterly language, drawing on over thirty years in European street writing across cities including London, Manchester, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, and Zurich. That gesture, born on walls, I now carry onto marine plywood panels through a slow process of layering and subtraction: coats of colour built up, then partially erased or veiled, echoing the way urban surfaces crack, fade, and rewrite themselves over time. The thread running through my work is time slipping away — the quiet melancholy of a mark fading, a tag dissolving, a trace barely legible. Each piece doesn't try to stop this decay but to hold onto its echo: a balance between the raw energy of the street and the precision of the calligraphic gesture, between what remains and what disappears.