Walls That Talk: Jay Kaes and the Politics of Perception
Written by Andi Schmitz
Published on May 28th, 2026
We are all accustomed to screens telling us what to look at, how to look at it, and what to want once we have. They glow in our hands and keep score of our attention while we scroll past. Images have never been more abundant, and authenticity has become a more prominent topic. Everything is sharpened, filtered, targeted, corrected, and sold back. In that flood of controlled images, a wall does something different. A wall interrupts, a wall exists in shared physical space, and a wall cannot be swiped away.
That is part of what makes Jay Kaes’ work hit the way it does. His murals do not sit still. Faces split, slide, double, dissolve into digital tears and chromatic ruptures. A portrait might begin in realism and end in fracture, as if the image is breaking apart under the pressure of too much information. But the glitch in Jay’s work is not there as a cool effect, nor as some empty nod to digital aesthetics. It is there to say something about the way we live now. His work asks what happens when perception itself is bent by screens, algorithms, and the endless churn of mediated reality.
For Jay, glitch is a language. It is a way of showing that what looks stable often is not. It is also a way of opening up beauty where people have been taught to see error.
For Jay, glitch is a language. It is a way of showing that what looks stable often is not. It is also a way of opening up beauty where people have been taught to see error. That impulse runs deeper than style, but graffiti came first.
Beginning in Spain, Jay found graffiti young, his mother was working three jobs, and he was spending much of his time out in the street spraying. Like a lot of writers, he found in graffiti not only an outlet but a structure, a way to exist publicly before the rest of the world had given him a role. He started by tagging his name and becoming part of the local scene, but what mattered most was that graffiti gave him a language early. It gave shape to identity before he fully knew what kind of artist he would become. As he put it, “Graffiti is how I’ve communicated with the world since I was 12. It’s my language.”
That statement matters because Jay’s work today, no matter how polished or conceptually layered, still grows from that original instinct. It is about communication. It is not about decoration or branding, not images for images’ sake.
His path into contemporary art was not exactly smooth.
His path into contemporary art was not exactly smooth. At 18, pushed by an ultimatum from his mother to leave that lifestyle behind, he moved out and pursued formal study, eventually earning a scholarship to complete a Master’s in Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country. For five years, he traveled long distances by bus to attend university, carrying with him the visual and psychological logic of graffiti into a space that did not always know what to do with it. At one point, he was reprimanded for using spray paint in a painting course, a detail that speaks volumes about the old hierarchies he was up against and the systems he has been challenging ever since.
That friction turned out to be productive. If spray paint was unwelcome in one room, he found other routes, and photography and animation entered the picture. He began documenting his life and identity, experimenting with storytelling and image-making beyond the spray can, and those experiments became foundational. During that period, he created a project called Presión, which explored how society views graffiti artists: distorted, mistrusted, simplified. While developing analog photographs, he became fascinated by blurs, errors, imperfections, and misfires in the image. Instead of treating them as technical failures, he began to see them as symbols. Something clicked there.
Later, when he moved to London, that earlier tension sharpened again. Like many artists trying to survive in a new city, he worked whatever jobs he could while building his confidence and making space for his work. He spent time working in hospitality, including night shifts at a salsa club, and at first, he tried to distance himself from graffiti altogether. At some point, the split became unsustainable. “One day, I had to choose between a stable hospitality career and art. I chose art,” he says. He left the job, took on design work, struggled financially, and pushed through the years that turn romantic artist mythology into a daily grind. A print vinyl shop in Hoxton, design work for a Ghanaian clothing brand, and gallery relationships built slowly over time, leading to Red Gallery and Paint Freaks. More importantly, he stopped trying to cleanly separate the fine artist from the graffiti writer. “I stopped hiding. I embraced who I was.”
That matters because Jay’s work does not read as if someone abandoned graffiti for “higher” forms. It reads like someone who carried graffiti’s urgency, publicness, and directness into a more layered visual language. Glitch Pop, the term now often associated with his style, developed organically out of that process. Jay traces it back to those university years, when he turned toward photography and storytelling after his pivot away from spray-painting, and then to London, where he returned to painting while holding on to distortion as both form and concept. Over time, through thousands of pieces, walls, and publications, the language became coherent. Or, in his words, “Style is what you repeat unconsciously.”
The power of Jay’s explanation of glitch lies in its concreteness.
The power of Jay’s explanation of glitch lies in its concreteness. He talks about the glitch not just as a visual disturbance but as a chain reaction. “First, something is off, and you ignore it. Then it happens again, and you question the device. Then yourself. Then, finally, the larger system that is producing the failure,” he explains. That sequence is what gives the work its charge. A glitched portrait is not just fractured because digital culture looks fractured; it is fractured to make you question what you trust, what you have normalized, and who benefits from that normalization. The distortion pushes you out of passive looking and forces you to really see.
Jay has a similar approach to beauty or perfection. Rather than correcting or smoothing the portrait, he glitches it, not to destroy the subject but to widen the frame of what can be seen as the whole. He talks about challenging standards, saying, “I like to embrace the errors or to embrace the differences in people. Because I think this will challenge the perception, like the standards of beauty, for example, or the stereotypes.” The so-called error becomes the part worth looking at. That is one of the reasons his portraits hold tension without losing warmth; they destabilize the image while still insisting on the human being inside it.
What pushes Jay’s work beyond an individual studio language is his belief in what a mural can do in public.
What pushes Jay’s work beyond an individual studio language is his belief in what a mural can do in public. He calls murals “one of the last truly democratic art forms,” and he is right to insist on that distinction. Public art reaches people regardless of whether they collect art, study it, or ever set foot in a gallery. It is encountered on the way to work, during a smoke break, or between errands. Unlike advertising, which occupies public vision in the service of private interest and capitalism, a mural can create a different kind of exchange. “My murals serve dialogue,” Jay says. “Walls That Talk” is his phrase for that public role: using shared surfaces to spark reflection, awareness, and conversation.
That phrase is particularly relevant today, when so much visual culture is engineered to keep people separate inside their own little algorithmic bubbles. Jay explains, “In a world fragmented by social media algorithms and echo chambers, murals reconnect people physically. They remind us that society is shared.” The wall becomes a site where conversation is not monetized or tailored to a user profile. It is just there, in the open, asking something of anyone who passes. “Art sparks conversation,” he says, and conversation creates change. That may sound simple, but simplicity is part of the force. The point is not to solve everything with a mural but to start where people still share a surface.
Photography remains crucial to all of this. Not just as documentation after the fact, but as part of how Jay sees. He photographs constantly, studies the history and surroundings of a wall, considers the light, the format, the community, and the architecture of the site. Back in the studio, he sketches from memory and from images, building compositions that respond to where they will live. Then the digital distortion enters. Then the wall. Afterward comes more photography, careful documentation, archiving, and preservation. Murals are temporary, and the archive is what lets them travel onward.
There is an ethics to that process, too. Jay is clear about what he will not put into public space.
There is an ethics to that process, too. Jay is clear about what he will not put into public space. “I believe in sensuality, not exploitation. I believe in unity, not division,” he says. There will be no racism, no misogyny, no anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, no glorification of violence. Public art, for him, carries responsibility and is consistent with the larger argument in his work. If walls talk, then what they say matters. If public space is still one of the few shared visual grounds left, then the image placed there has to answer for itself.
The emotional stakes of that become clearest in the story Jay tells about a mural in Gragnano, near Naples, dedicated to a young boy named Alessandro who reportedly took his own life after online bullying. Meeting the boy’s parents and dedicating that wall to him remain among the most powerful experiences of his career. That is where rhetoric falls away. You understand in an instant what a wall can carry and what art can hold when it is made in public and for people, not just around them.
Jay has said that he wants to be a witness to his time. Not in some grandiose way, not as the lone heroic artist, but as someone leaving behind images that speak from inside this era rather than through the polished voice of institutions or corporations. That may be the clearest way to understand his work. The glitch is not a collapse but a signal. The glitch tells you the image in front of you is under pressure, that perception is unstable, and that beauty is bigger than the standards shown on screens. And on the right wall, in the right city, at the right moment, it tells you that public art can still cut through the noise and say something worth hearing.
Andi Schmitz is a writer, artist and recent American expat. Born in Dublin, Ireland and raised in a smörgåsbord of places, she has recently relocated to Berlin, Germany. Lifelong writer and artist, she is recovering from former corporate fintech life by self-induced art immersion. Her hobbies include painting, a good whiskey sour, and exploring art as a form of social outcry.