Fresh Off the Wall
Matt Perry is KRAMPUS — crafting bold lines and bright colors into vibrant art with a dark sense of humor.
KRAMPUS paints in the language of vinyl toys and back-alley tags: thick black contour lines, a palette that refuses to sit still, and characters that look like they wandered off a cereal box and into a crime scene #
KRAMPUS paints in the language of vinyl toys and back-alley tags: thick black contour lines, a palette that refuses to sit still, and characters that look like they wandered off a cereal box and into a crime scene #
Matt Perry - aka KRAMPUS - works in the language of vinyl toys and back-alley tags: thick black contour lines, a palette that refuses to sit still, and characters that look like they wandered off a cereal box and into a crime scene.
Self-taught, he's been drawing since he was a kid — comic panels, ninja fights, the usual margin scribbles that never really stopped. Street art was the first thing that made painting feel like it belonged to him, and Basquiat and Warhol stuck early: one for the raw mark-making, the other for turning a symbol into something you can't stop seeing. Heavy metal runs under most of it, less as a mood board than a tempo — loud, fast, unapologetic.
His figures are built to be liked first and questioned second — a shape you'd recognize from a toy aisle or a kid's show, dropped into a scene that isn't playing by kid's-show rules. The color does most of the talking: hot pink next to acid green, mustard gold picking a fight with cobalt blue, nothing allowed to sit quiet for long. Underneath the brightness is a sense of humor that leans dark — not shock for its own sake, more like a joke that keeps going one beat past comfortable.
KRAMPUS work doesn't ask for white walls. It gets photographed on brick, propped against concrete, left somewhere it could pass for street art — because that's the context it was built to survive in. He paints out of a studio in Littleton, NH, but the work itself still looks like it's trying to get outside.