With his Battlezone series, Cortesnyc presents a visceral body of work that fuses street art, political urgency, and visual storytelling. Each piece functions as a frontline dispatch, blurring the line between urban graffiti and war-torn reportage.
The backgrounds are composed of collage elements sourced from old war books. These layers bring archival imagery of past conflicts into direct collision with the immediacy of street culture. Over these fragmented historical landscapes, Cortesnyc overlays a chaotic symphony of freestyle tags and raw graffiti outlines. These marks aren’t merely aesthetic. They become embedded in the terrain like cultural shrapnel; altering and reclaiming the visual narrative.
Executed in mixed media, each Battlezone piece is an original, one-of-one work, signed by the artist. These are not reproductions; they’re raw field notes from a creative war zone. The series is part of the Kontraband 2025 collection, a curated selection of works that push back against sanitized narratives and passive consumption.
Battlezone doesn’t just depict conflict; it immerses the viewer in it.
Cortesnyc invites us to stand in the ruins, read the walls, and recognize graffiti not as vandalism or trend, but as testimony.
Pieces available for purchase on cortesnyc.bigcartel.com
