Emil – All Cats Are Beautiful

Goch history meets streerart festival 2020 organized by Benjamin Taag and the Heimatverein Goch e.V.
Lacuna is a street artist who remains anonymous. His work focuses on injustice, exploitation, exclusion and other socially critical issues. He depicts them primarily with figurative stencils, poetry, slogans, and street interventions.

In his childhood, Lacuna came across the book The Yellow Star by Gerhard Schönberner about the prosecution of Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945. This book had an enormous impact on him and subsequently influenced his work. He became politically active in the anarchist and anti-fascist movement. During this time, he read a how-to-do article about graffiti writing in a political magazine. Lacuna had already been painting political slogans on walls, but this article planted the roots for his further activities. After several trail draft pieces on paper, he sprayed his first graffiti on a wall at the end of 1994.

The limitation of spraying nothing but his own name restricted Lacuna. He found himself unable to express his feelings and thoughts in the way he was aiming for. Many people cannot read or understand graffiti lettering. He therefore started to draw figures with pencil on paper in order to convey a wider range of issues that included solutions as well as reflections of society in addition to an emotional context besides anger or dismay at the state of the human world. The early works of Blek le Rat and Banksy encouraged him to include people in his graffiti. In 2002, he cut out his first stencil and sprayed it on a wall.

Stencilling makes precision possible. Lacuna prepares the work at his own leisure in the studio before transferring it to a wall. Through stencils, he passes his criticism on society and current political affairs in a direct, subtle, and humorous way. He highlights alternatives and includes his own perspectives. Many of his paintings are done in black and white to concentrate on the message and the meaning. Furthermore, Lacuna has delved into and explored the period from 1914 to 1945, with an emphasis on the activists, authors, thinkers, and anti-totalitarian movements of that era. They are often a subject in his work with stencils. He aims to summon them back into public consciousness.