This Street Artist Builds Monumental Illusions With Nothing More Than Black, White, and Gray » Design You Trust — Design Daily Since 2007

Alan De Cecco, an Italian artist based in London who has been writing the name SODA since 1993. Emerging from graffiti, he has developed a precise visual language of deconstructed letters, floating geometry, and monochrome trompe-l’œil — work that makes flat walls appear to open into shifting architectural space.

SODA starts from the foundational act of graffiti writing: putting a name on a wall. But in his work, the letters of S-O-D-A are fragmented, stretched, layered, and stripped back until they sit at the boundary between language and abstraction. A viewer may recognize a letter, then lose it inside a field of black, white, gray, shadow, and sharp-edged planes.

This is not lettering as decoration. It is lettering as structure. By deconstructing his tag into intersecting geometric components, SODA turns a signature into an architectural system — one that can expand from a sketch or canvas to an entire concrete facade.

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