Zap is an old-school graffiti artist who has been covering the inner-city Sydney suburbs of Newtown, Surry Hills, Redfern and Chippendale for more than 23 years. Zap's unique style is a blend of retro, abstract and psychedelic monsters and subhumans that recall the underground comic-book scene and counterculture of the 1960s.
When asked about his choice of name Zap has stated, I have been working under the name ZAP since 1996. However my first tag was SHAZAM which came from comic books and that was in 1986, this led to me using the name ZAP. Also what inspired the name ZAP was all the comic speech bubbles which had ZAP in them, and graffiti art from the 70s. The name ZAP made me think of a superhero character which fights bad guys and rains an array of cosmic colours across city walls.
This paste-up differs to the artist's well-known brightly coloured hand-painted billboard-sized posters. It is a much smaller, black and white single character piece, created as a cut-out work on paper. Perhaps Zap's paste-up is an expressionistic portrait of the main character from the American Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson's novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; a character who wanders aimlessly in a hallucinogenic state, imagining himself at one stage, to be wearing an alligator outfit and tail piece.
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