Why I work on audio cassettes rather than on canvas

The audio cassette is not an easy medium. It is irregular, technical, full of pitfalls. That is exactly why I chose it. Like tattooing skin, working on a difficult medium demands a level of precision that canvas does not.

When people discover my work, the first question is often the same. Why cassettes? Why not canvas, a metal plate, wood?

The short answer: because it is difficult.

The long answer is this article.

Twenty-five years of tattooing have taught me one thing: working on a technical, irregular, living medium demands a level of precision that neutral supports do not. Canvas is forgiving. Skin is not. Neither are cassette gears.

When I looked for a medium for my stencil work, I wasn't looking for something easy. I was looking for something that resists, that imposes its constraints, that forces you to be precise.

The audio cassette was that medium.

A technical object, not a surface

An audio cassette is not flat. It has contours, gears, recesses, and areas that absorb paint differently. When assembling several dozen or even hundreds of cases to create a portrait, you are working on an entire topography, not a uniform surface.

The stencil must conform to all of this, and every contour imposes its own rules. I detailed this constraint in the article about stenciling on audio cassettes.

This technical constraint is not an obstacle. It is what gives the result its value. When a portrait works on this medium, it truly works.

What the cassette brings that canvas does not

Canvas is neutral. It has no history before you touch it. An audio cassette has already lived. It has held music, voices, recorded silence. It has been held in hands, turned over, rewound. Some still bear handwritten inscriptions, titles written in ballpoint pen forty years ago.

When it becomes the medium for a portrait, it is not blank. It comes with something inside it. And that something remains present in the final work, invisible but real.

That is what I would call density. A new canvas does not have it. A cassette found at a flea market does.

Is it recycling?

I am sometimes asked this from an environmental perspective. I am not going to claim that this is my primary motivation.

I hunt for cassettes every Sunday because those are the objects that interest me, not to reduce my carbon footprint. There is an environmental consequence: hundreds of plastic cases that do not end up in the waste disposal facility, but it is secondary.

What interests me is the material. Its resistance, its history, the constraints it imposes, exactly as skin imposes constraints on the tattoo artist. A difficult medium forces you to be better. And when you succeed, the result carries that difficulty within it.

That is why I work on cassettes rather than canvas.