Artist/curator Axel Void is framing it this way when inviting 24 artists to Barcelona for TÀPIA (“walls” in Catalan). Figurative muralism also comes to mind as you look over these new walls ofNau Bostik.
Graffiti writers, Street Artists, contemporary artists: all of these participate in this impermanent show, each in their own expression of realism, and poetic realism, as long as we’re feeling like coining a term.
“Traditionally in
‘street art’ these walls and spaces have presented themselves as vulnerable to
the interventions of artist,” say organizers. “Blurring the edges of this
physical, yet metaphorical division, between the idea of private and public.”
We’re
pleased today to present original photos of the murals that were executed
outdoors in conjunction with the exhibition.
“Tapia” is currently on view at B-Murals in Barcelona. The exhibition ends February 29 2020. Click HERE for more information and to see the artworks in the exhibition.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. “Realm: Shanghai” Vhils directed by Jose Pando Lucas 2. ARTRIUM, Moscow. (part 1) 3. Faith XVLII x Philadelphia, ‘The Silent Watcher’.
BSA Special Feature: “Realm: Shanghai” Vhils directed by Jose Pando Lucas
Like other fashion and luxury brands, certain contemporary art galleries are commissioning higher-end film quality videos to put muscle behind the marketing. Naturally, some artwork is camera-ready, infused with the potential for storytelling that creates the “rich content” that social media thrives on, and aids sales teams in the gallery space and at art fairs. Portuguese Street Artist Vhils has director Jose Pando Lucas along as sophisticated seer; The artist once again bringing a storyline into savvy focus, capturing your imagination with his.
“I remember the story I was told,” intones the mystical
modern while staring into the camera. “That in time I would know my place in
this world.”
The tone is perhaps meant to reassure an unsteady heart in a chaotic modern world, to center oneself in a dislocating environment. Viewed as an appealing sales tool, it also skillfully fortifies a self-image of the entitled powerful class who are pre-ordained or chosen to dominate and to lead. Anonymous and existential mournful stares through city windows and at bus stops, the artworks under construction are born of destruction; mottled, rough-hewn, defiant in the city’s margins.
Tradition struggles for its place amidst amazing new technology and rapidly growing infrastructure. The artist posits himself as working man pounding on walls, without airs of class. With this art in your home you are keeping in touch with the common, the everyday insecurities, for you are citizen. You can afford it because, after all, you are also a ruler.
“Nobody really got the answers they longed for.”
“Do we live as we dream?”
“Who else can hear me right now?”
Youthful, fashionable, under constraint, free of constraint,
traditional and unconventional power players laying plans quietly, focusing a pent-up
hunger for more. This is the ocean of wealth and capacity that will define
epochs, not decades.
It ends sweetly, a bon mot that suggests a sense of human camaraderie among competitors of this race. But it is an uncertain connection, born more of wistful desire for a pleasant resolution than actual brotherhood or sisterhood.
“Yesterday is gone. This moment has ended.”
VHILS – REALM (Shanghai, 2019) A film by Jose Pando Lucas
ARTRIUM, Moscow. (part 1)
An educational insight into the people and the place.
Unusual in the Russian Federation, if not the commercialized western cultures which have willfully merged graffiti and Street Art culture to the point of quotidian, The Artrium combines a shopping mall with murals by Street Artists. What is remarkable is the list of names who regale this city skin with new pieces inside and outside, bringing to life an otherwise normal grey and beige block.
Astounding to discover in the center of Moscow, the outdoor gallery boasts artists such as Shepard Fairey, Felipe Pantone, Tristan Eaton, Ben Eine, PichiAvo, Okuda San Miguel, Pokras Lampas, Faith47, WK Interact, Faust, and Haculla. Average visitors may not grasp the remarkable collection of talents, but if you are shopping in this capital city, you wouldn’t want to miss this opportunity that captures a stunning moment in the rotation of the Street Art universe.
Faith XVLII x Philadelphia, ‘The Silent Watcher’. By Chop ’em Down Films
In the words of Faith XLVII;
‘I come from a country that is seething with the frustration of
uncontrollable violence and woman abuse, xenophobia , class and racial
divide.
And have moved to a country where there seems to be a fundamental crisis in the very soul of the nation.
We know this ache of our lands.
And we all know personal ache.
Everybody has their struggle to bear.
And with the weight of the world on our shoulders,
we must still be able to live with empathy
We must somehow keep our hearts open.
The words on this wall are a reference to the City Seal of Philadelphia with calls out for brotherly love.
This is no small commitment.
It also references a quote ‘Optimism is a strategy for a Better Future.’
Paying tribute to Noam Chomsky who was born in Philadelphia and is 91 years old this year. .
The harsh experiences of life can easily make us fall into a negative world view,
or inner psychological depression.
But we each have the ability to transform this base metal of knowing suffering,
into the gold of higher aspiration.
The name of this mural is ‘The Silent Watcher’
We can be the silent watcher, who knows, who loves and who endures.’
An in-studio visit today on BSA with Street Artists Icy & Sot. We were happy to check in with them and talk about new techniques they are discovering and creating to make art recently. Remembering the astounding sculpture they created during our curation of the opening exhibition at the Urban Nation museum a couple of years ago, where they created an eerie steel immigrant family silhouette; people who were harrowingly trying to pass through a steel wall. Recalling the power of that piece we were interested to see the evolution of this 2-D method of conveying the features of an individual yet representing the aspirations of humanity in a much broader way.
In the seven years since we first met them, having just arrived from Iran in Brooklyn, we have witnessed such a rigorous, considered set of ethical guidelines in their choices of subjects and techniques, even as we could see their personal and professional evolution. Minimalist, even spartan, they hue to a simple line that is personal and yet universal.
These new profiles in steel are an example of new tools they
have personally crafted from discarded items.
“We used to walk like every day around here,” says Icy as he
motions out of the grimy factory window of their Brooklyn studio to the
industrial truck traffic below on the street.
“We found this rusty shovel and we said, ‘What are we going
to do with this?’” he says as he twirls the wooden shaft in revolutions, the
profile of a man cut out of the shovel’s blade. Once they collected a number of
the discarded diggers and developed a way to saw them into shapes and smooth
their rough edges, they decided to make a number of them.
“Then we did this series about working-class people,” Sot
says. Lined up and leaning forward on the wall, the sculptures seem like they
might talk in gruff and frank voices, might tell you about their toil, or speak
of the soil.
“We wanted to cut them out like ‘workers’ profiles,” says Icy.
They tell us about a grouping of the shovels shown this spring in Lisbon at Underdogs Gallery, owned and operated by Street Artist Alexandre Farko aka Vhils. The exhibition, named “Faces of Society” expanded the new cutting technique to include other materials like the brush of a hand-broom, the brass plates of the scales of justice, a sawed briefcase full of money, a pair of leather gloves smashed one upon the other. For followers of the artists, these new works all recalled the people-shaped holes in chain link fences that they have been cutting in recent years as well.
Aside from this reductionist approach to art-making, they have also been developing a unique process for applying paint with the inner core of a cutout. By specifically smearing paint directly to the metal shape, pressing it on canvas or parchment, and pulling away, the remaining paint gives the impression of movement and action. One series called “Dreams” features the guys singular focus on color, and on metal to create streaming portraits in red, green, blue, yellow, bronze, copper, gold and silver.
The artists then showed us their technique for creating
these new paintings, a simple and possibly profound revelatory form of
portraiture that infers stories in its streaks, suggests individual character
in each rhythmic pulling back of the painted blade. When on display at
Underdogs, they called this series “What is Love?”. A good question, as usual.
Here in Fanzara, Spain her new mural for the MIAU Festival is in two distinct parts, separated by bricked wall, interconnected by a chord. The malleable wire of energy seems to envelop the nude as she reaches toward a winged being which is taking flight, thin rope in claw.
This looks like a powerful creature. You may imagine this whimsical scene taking a difficult turn as soon as this bird is airborne and the entangled figure is dragged along behind, haplessly scraping along the ground and banging into houses, cars, and bushes until lifted up above the trees.
Niepoort tells us that this is scene
not to be taken so literally.
“The mural is about the process of letting go of those things we have a hard time letting go of,” she says. Given the moment she has depicted here, there is little time remaining to let go.
Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Jacques Villegle, Blek le Rat, Miss Tic, Jef Aerosol. Each of these important French Street Artists can rightly claim their mantel in the history of this movement. The one who is more often associated as being one of the first, if not the first Street Artist is Gérard Zlotykamien (Zloty).
His silhouettes or “Ephemeres” predate both Philadelphia’s Cornbread and New York’s Taki183 by a couple of years, so the argument goes, but due to the illegal nature of the practice and the fondness for the anonymity of graffiti writers, we may never know the answer. One thing is for sure, very few Street Artists from the 1960s are climbing 20 meters up a wall in Paris today, spray can in hand, to complete a new fresco.
Pushing 80 years old, Mr. Zlotykamien has been active since 1963 – a serious career of whimsical, funny and possibly frightening stick figures rendered with a quivering can and dislocated appendages afloat. Using the negative space as well, the elements gather as cells in a petri dish, scattered with meaning, an inner calculation. It’s childlike, subconscious, surreal, a cousin to Miró, perhaps, now looming above your head on this wall in a cozy neighborhood. We thought it may represent a man strolling with his walking stick.
After standing in the shadows of massive photorealistic and lushly illustrated murals of more recent vintage in cities around the world, the simplicity and purity of Zloty’s new work is frankly refreshing, and it reverberates. He says that he presented three options to members of this community, and this one was the one that was chosen. Now working here with Mathgoth Gallery, Zloty’s legal work is taking a grand scale.
A duo of wall painters show us their very different approaches to graphic design, illustration, and sign painting in these two new pieces completed last week in Sant Vicenç des Horts, Spain.
Joan Tarragó paints his “Fight Plastic Portal” with
his “fusion of graphic language, ancient symbolism and surf influences,” he
says. The wrapping line-work its pulsating natural energy washes over you in
waves of turquoise and curving black lines. If these patterns look familiar you
may have seen his work on facades and skating courts in places like Miami, New
York, Japan, and Bali.
Ángel Toren elevates the “tag” of traditional graffiti writers as interpreted by theater posters and cinemas by employing optical play, geometric sharpness, crisp layers of color and dimension. The skills are so focused that you forget this is by hand, by can, by brush.
Toren says his work “focuses on the tri-dimensionality of space, depth and perspective as a dance in the composition.” His 2 and 3-D color plays have appeared as abstract and pop-informed graffiti stays true to his roots while pushing the boundaries of the accepted idea of a piece that was first defined by train writers.
The walls are part of an initiative from Contorno Urbano, a
community based public art effort which is beginning a new edition of their 12
+ 1 project in Sant Vinceç del Horts, featuring interventions on Rafael
Casanova’s street walls. The temporary installations ride two months, to be
replaced by a new duo.
Welcome December! Welcome final month of the decade!
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week with 1 Up Crew, Bergero, Dirt Cobain, Disturbanity, Goal, Felix Gephart, Konozco, Lego Party, Leonardi, Lik Mi, HOAC, LOL, Phetus, Rice, Traz, TWC Krew, and Yard5 Festival.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
