Handstyle: when everything starts with the signature
critical text by Sara Fosco
March 28, 2026
Former NATO Base – Viale della Liberazione 1, Naples.
Handstyle refers to the personal calligraphic style of a graffiti artist, the graphic gesture that signs a writer's identity. When I think of Tres, I see his mark. With my eyes closed, the artist becomes a tag. The man and the name overlap in the clear outline of four letters: T-R-E-S.
Why does this happen? Because Tres is a style writer: an artist who focuses his expressive research almost exclusively on the execution of letters in an exercise of extreme calligraphy that sweeps away the rules of typography, readability, and written comprehension.
Nìuru is a heterogeneous collection of unique pieces, all created in 2026. On display are some ACAB canvases, two works painted on walls, and about ten calligrams: three typologies that demonstrate the elasticity of a mature execution that transforms to narrate the turns and nuances of his journey.
The title reveals Tony Tres's Salento roots and the trepidation of someone who has entered the world of tattooing while remaining true to his aesthetic research. On one wall, there's a piece that retains a sharp and immediate stroke, typical of old-school graffiti culture; on the other wall, a page from a style diary, and in the center, works on mobile support halfway between graffiti and calligram. Even in his tattoos, Tres confirms himself as a master of lettering who uses skin as an alternative medium to continue drawing with words. It is precisely from the execution of black work, no-color tattoos, that Tres develops the series of calligrams: no-stencil works in which the letter is studied as a solid form without outline and through the ambition of the icon, as I improperly can't help but call them, recounts the experience begun in 2019 within the YELETRES duo when Tres's style opened up to a context of graphics, poster art, and socio-political activism murals.
A special mention goes to the full-wall alphabet that reproduces a page from a style diary. Tres wanted this element to show that graffiti execution is not always a throw-up, spontaneous, as non-experts might imagine; more often, the exercise of style is the result of years of training and manic consistency, daily trials of movement and color that mark the pages of sketchbooks.
All this work on the conception of the artwork is documented by the publications No Color Sketch, a collection of Style Diaries that Tres self-produced in 2010 and has published since 2019 with ShowDesk. With the No Color diaries, the reader enters and exits the creative process, learning to recognize layering and flow, compensation elements, and tags of the writers who have chosen to collaborate from time to time.
Nìuru is therefore a journey where the blank page and the wall merge, revealing the invisible architecture that supports every single line and restores graffiti to its most authentic nature: that of a language in continuous, obsessive evolution.
-------
Text by Tiziano Manna
The 'letter,' a unifying element and common thread in Tres's artistic research, represents the graphic gesture that traverses and links every phase of his production, becoming a deep investigation into form as identity. The geometries of the letters become a primary creative tool for Tres, who molds them into complex and elastic structures inspired by the murals of revolutionary Cuba – with their propagandistic monumentality and iconic two-dimensionality – and passing through the explosive energy of 80s graffiti, between wildstyle and New York tag-burning. Writing thus asserts itself as the binder of the triple exhibition approach – wall graffiti, calligraphy on mobile support, tattooed lettering – transforming the exhibition into an evolutionary journey where the style and geometries of the letter not only sign the work but also designate its evolutionary, historical, and personal architecture.
————————
Talk, workshop and exhibition curated by Talking Letters.
The event was organized by Bereshit in collaboration with Escape Vision.
