You never know who you will find in the BSMT, and this little blue guy from Brazil is just the perfect troublemaker to light the doorway as you pass by. A talisman for the global game of street art and graffiti, Cranio’s blue character is an extension perhaps of himself – a combination alter-ego and representative for the indigenous people of Brazil.
Now he travels to this London gallery called BSMT, the newest canvasses engaging you as the artist Cranio (Fabio de Oliveira Parnaiba) invites you to engage again with his philosophical, comedic, and socially observant blue man.
Stencil master C215 curated a mural festival in the city of Loan in Northern France last month, their first street art festival called Festival d’art Urbain de Laon. Among the names on this first 16 name roster are artists such as Alexone, Isaac Cordal, Collin van der Sluijs, Monkeybird, Speedy Graffito, and our featured artist today – Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada.
Using a style that you may recognize as his signature, Gerada tells us this portrait is in striped tones, “that run across the face encompassing many skin tones to depict the universal effects of social media, its algorithms and viral video.” It is an interesting concept, this “Outsight” mural of exterior latex paint measuring 10 meters by 14 meters large.
Taking a week to complete this mural that will surely do well on social media channels, Jorge tells us that “The goal with this mural is to talk about how children are seeing this world through a mobile phone from such a young age, as it becomes more evident that parents use the screen as a new pacifier, without considering the effects on a young developing mind. The piece invites us to reflect on this phenomenon and its impact on society.”
Franco-Spanish duo Dourone show us their latest mural on the gable of a building in the Villa Normandie residence in Chennevières Sur Marne. They call it “Chez Soi” (at home) and they looked as if their intention was to bring a feeling a home to the neighborhood while they talked with passersby.
Done at the invitation of Alessandra and Mouarf and their project #Wallcity, Dourone says thank you to the hosts, the helpers, and to the neighbors who brought them treats, like ice cream, on hot summer days.
Dourone. “Chez-soi”. Chennevières sur marne, France. (photo courtesy of Dourone)Dourone. “Chez-soi”. Chennevières sur marne, France. (photo courtesy of Dourone)Dourone. “Chez-soi”. Chennevières sur marne, France. (photo courtesy of Dourone)Dourone. “Chez-soi”. Chennevières sur marne, France. (photo courtesy of Dourone)
“I just unveiled a new artwork in the Swiss Alps, in Villars-sur-Ollon,” Saype tells us when talking about the new 2500 m2 painting on a high grassy elevation. “’Vers l’équilibre’” (Towards balance) depicts a little girl forming a cairn on a pile of books.”
Massive pieces like this by Saype merge muralism and land art, a hybrid that is not common even now. It may be shocking for some people to see until they learn that the materials used are not harmful to the environment, and are biodegradable. Here the final image is still best seen from a drone perhaps, but if you are hiking near the summit of the Grand Chamossaire mountain, above the alpine resort of Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland, you too may find the right angle for a view.
Jesus it’s rough out there! Throwing a frisbee could cause a heart attack in this heat wave. This situation is like the polar opposite of a winter snowstorm that forces everyone to stay inside their apartments. Believe it or not, in this city we have such extremes. We gave you Trump and we also gave you Bernie Sanders, for example.
Trying to think happy thoughts on the street despite the crushing debilitating heat and we are greeted by a mopey Gen Z guy carrying a sign that says “this is the coolest summer of the rest of your life”. Thanks, Senor Killjoy.
The good thing, and we insist on concentrating on these good things, is that New York is positively swimming with gorgeous young things who are traipsing through the streets in barely there gear and you don’t even need to buy pot to get high now because the streets are swirling with it. Also, you can buy pot anywhere; in a curbside truck, on a brownstone stoop, from a Nigerian guy out of a suitcase on the sidewalk on Canal street, even at your grandma’s Saturday canasta match.
$100 two years ago is worth only $85, but our parks are still free and full of leafy trees and concerts and theater and city pools are staying open extra hours to cool off. Burning Spear, UB40, Animal Collective, Sharon Van Etten, The Decemberists, Khruangbin, Erykah Badu, Shakespeare in the Park, anybody? We always sit on a blanket outside the gate and enjoy the music nonetheless – you can too. Also, as a reminder, we are not at war with each other – all us different races and religions. That’s all a huge lie on the TV machine. New Yorkers actually like each other.
Our street art as usual is off the hook. This week it seems a little bit cuddly, to tell the truth.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Rambo,Hiss, Dirty Bandits, Modomatic, Neon Savage, Muckrock, You Are Not Alone, Third Rail Art, Rari Grafix, OH!, Drama, and Banksy Hates Me.
Christschurch in New Zealand has seen a boom in street art for the last decade, which many say was sparked by the devastating earthquake that killed nearly 200 people in 2011. Rising like a creative phoenix on painted walls, street artists’ created an organic artful response – healing hearts and summoning community pride in the beauty here in Ōtautahi, the name given to this city first by the Māori.
Pener. Vacation From Reality exhibition at the Fiksate Galley in Christchurch, New Zealand. (photo courtesy of the artist)
A boom in the gallery scene quickly followed, and Jenna and Nathan Ingram opened Fiksate in 2015. The white box gallery is known primarily as a respected hub for the street art/urban contemporary art genres. They have a steadily growing roster of local and international artists, some of whom you may recognize.
Currently, they are hosting a show by the Polish artist Pener, whose saturated abstractions have evolved from his deconstructing of graffiti letterforms and his fascination with the mechanized world. Today he confesses that his forms are softening somewhat due to his maturing process and gentle way of looking at life. Part of a growing school of Polish artists creating abstract works, Pener (Bartek Swiqtecki) has become quite passionate about this non-figurative form that allows for individual interpretation.
Pener. Step Into the Light, 2022. Vacation From Reality exhibition at the Fiksate Galley in Christchurch, New Zealand. (photo courtesy of the artist)
He arrived in NZ after a 30-hour trip from Poland and worked quickly for a week to mount the exhibition “Vacation From Reality.” The show features eight large original canvasses, three limited-edition prints, and some abstractly grey shadowed walls on which to hang them.
Pener spoke of his process and headspace with local street art expert Reuben Woods, an art historian, writer, and curator. He writes a column for the website “Watch This Space” about the lively street art scene.
Pener. Brainstorm, 2022. Vacation From Reality exhibition at the Fiksate Galley in Christchurch, New Zealand. (photo courtesy of the artist)
From the interview, we share with you just one Q&A from their discussion that marks this exhibition to provide BSA readers with greater context and insight.
Reuben Woods:As an abstract artist, you have stated you start with an emotion and the process, and when I look at your work, I can’t help but feel it captures the anxiety and emotional fracture of contemporary society. Is that intentional or a result of our ability to read abstraction as we need to? Pener: I often get the impression that the paintings are a bit like mirrors in which we can look at our emotions. My paintings calm me down and give me peace. Often, in the process of painting, I freeze in front of a painting. I look at it for so long that I stop thinking. It’s the same feeling as if you swim for a long time in the swimming pool or climb in the mountains and stop thinking about everyday problems. It takes you somewhere inside or outside.
Probably everyone has a slightly different interpretation of works of art – which is very interesting. Some people see specific shapes in them, others only feel emotions. I am very happy when someone interprets my paintings in a way that I did not know and did not notice.
Pener. Jungle of doom, 2022. Vacation From Reality exhibition at the Fiksate Galley in Christchurch, New Zealand. (photo courtesy of the artist)Pener. Frozen Paths, 2022. Vacation From Reality exhibition at the Fiksate Galley in Christchurch, New Zealand. (photo courtesy of the artist)Pener. Vacation From Reality exhibition at the Fiksate Galley in Christchurch, New Zealand. (photo courtesy of the artist)Pener. Vacation From Reality exhibition at the Fiksate Galley in Christchurch, New Zealand. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. URBAN NATION 2022 – “Talking… & Other Banana Skins” – on FWTV 2. Flower Punk”- Azuma Makoto 3. JR: Can Art Change the World?
BSA Special Feature: URBAN NATION 2022 – “Talking… & Other Banana Skins” – on FWTV
In his first official visit back to Urban Nation since its opening in 2017, Fifth Wall host Doug Gillen finds a more democratic collection of artists from various points in the street art/urban art constellation. That impression is understandable due to the heavy presence of commercial interests involved in the selection of bankable street art stars and OGs chosen to represent five decades of graffiti/street art at the opening of a new institution dedicated to the scene. Curators were careful to program several relative unknowns and lesser-recognized artists into that initial grab-bag collection, but we take the point.
It’s refreshing to hear the current show’s curator Michelle Houston speak about her personal and professional philosophy toward street art and our collective relationship to it. A hybrid of the existing UN permanent collection and new works, it comes off as a rather wholistic approach that respects more players and their contribution to what has proven to be a very democratic grassroots art movement on streets around the world.
With decidedly less focus on the ever-more codified, commodified, and blue-chip-ivy-league-endorsed criterion of exclusivity that plagues the ‘art world’, this varied collection may represent a retaining wall against trends we witness that threaten to erect the same sort of structures of exclusivity that unbridled art-in-the-streets set out to destroy. Of course, every modern counterculture eventually gets transformed on its way to accepted culture, and we’re somewhat resigned to that reality. However rather than zapping the life out of the free-wheeling nature of graffiti and street art, Urban Nation may be staking a claim of departure from peers to defend some of those original tenets – in this insistently self-defining scene.
And speaking of every modern counterculture that eventually gets transformed on its way to accepted culture, we present the Punk Florist, artist Azuma Makoto, who uses plants in a sculptural manner. It is a practice that he hopes can connect humanity and nature. It may help if you are listening to Dead Kennedys or Black Flag – or perhaps something more industrial, or no-wave. But when he and his team send a ragged bundle of beauty literally into space, all bets are off. It’s a new game.
Part of the Querétaro Experimental international public art festival this summer, the artist says his new mirrored pole is called presents Refraktur. As one of the 200 artists across a wide range of disciplines, including music, theatre, dance, performance and sculpture, the muralist is taking on glass, metal, mirrored glass and LEDs to entertain and perhaps puzzle passersby.
“This piece seeks to create an atmosphere that invites the public to reflect on its presence and the environment,” says Dokins “through a scriptural space in the form of a tower that during the day appears as a mirror and during the night is illuminated through the screen hidden within the structure, where a series of words, signs and symbols are in constant movement.”
“This piece seeks to create an atmosphere that invites the public to reflect on its presence and the environment, through a scriptural space in the form of a tower that during the day appears as a mirror and during the night is illuminated through the screen hidden within the structure, where a series of words, signs and symbols are in constant movement,” explains Dokins.
The original fires of historical St. Joseph celebrations in Italy neatly coincided with pagan rituals of burning bonfires at the Spring equinox. It was a perfect act of marketing from both that caused both Catholics and heathen to join the dances and songs honoring the heat and the flames reaching high into night skies. In another hybrid activity of sorts, we find a former graffiti writer crossing into a new field to pay homage to his graffiti and Italian roots; employing professional graphic display skills to re-activate a public space.
Matteo Capobianco aka Ufocinque. Creative Living Lab – 3rd Edition. Associazione Culturale Antonio Giordano. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of ACAG)
Designer and scenographer Matteo Capobianco (aka UfoCinque) lights the municipality of Santa Croce di Magliano with this new flaming installation called “U marauasce” to recall the majestic fires lit over centuries at the feast of St. Joseph, the original caretaker of Jesus.
Foregoing the traditional olive trees and vines from the countryside typically used in fire-making, Capobianco conjures the tall licking flames by cutting plastic sheets and playing with light shining through the negative space.
Matteo Capobianco aka Ufocinque. Creative Living Lab – 3rd Edition. Associazione Culturale Antonio Giordano. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of ACAG)
The organizers say that as the winning submission for the “Creative Living Lab – 3rd edition” public notice, this fire is part of a more considerable effort to revitalize the municipality. As you can see from the photos, this is a legal installation done with the community’s involvement in the courtyard of the former elementary school. It is yet another way that artists can use urban interventions to alter public space and provoke/evoke discussion, memories, emotions, and historical events.
Matteo Capobianco aka Ufocinque. Creative Living Lab – 3rd Edition. Associazione Culturale Antonio Giordano. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of ACAG)Matteo Capobianco aka Ufocinque. Creative Living Lab – 3rd Edition. Associazione Culturale Antonio Giordano. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of ACAG)Matteo Capobianco aka Ufocinque. Creative Living Lab – 3rd Edition. Associazione Culturale Antonio Giordano. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of ACAG)Matteo Capobianco aka Ufocinque. Creative Living Lab – 3rd Edition. Associazione Culturale Antonio Giordano. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of ACAG)
Sometimes it just hits you, a joke. You bend back and lift your chin and belt out a joyful laugh.In the pantheon of positive health behaviors, this unbridled outburst must be one of those actions recommended regularly – sure to keep your life lighter and longer.
“The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.”
J.D. Salinger
Bifido. Popularte Festival. Lozzi, Corsica. France. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Italian street artist, photographer, sociologist, and philosopher Bifido shows us this newest diptych of two girls expressing simple emotions in the smallest town we can imagine. Not far from the laughing girl is the shy one, hiding behind her hands, unsure if that will be enough to comfort herself.
“Lozzi is in the Niolu region, about 80 people live there, there is no commercial activity, no bar, no market, no school, nothing,” Bifido says, which makes you consider the impact of these powerful large-scale images before an audience not accustomed to the visual litter of the big city.
We are always intrigued by such small towns across Europe inhabited by a handful of individuals. We asked Bifido about the town and he told us that “I believe that such a village can make you fall in love. Totally surrounded by nature, a precious silence and all noises are children of nature. The gentleman who organizes the festival is a math teacher at the university, when he has to go to work he takes 1 hour by car which I imagine is nothing for you, but for a European, especially one who lives in such a place it is a long way.
He organizes the festival himself and does it for the local children. In fact, he has a beautiful spirit. He likes to invite artists who involve local children, and even sometimes with the artists themselves, the children destroy the works after a few days as an act of participation”.
Bifido. Popularte Festival. Lozzi, Corsica. France. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Even in these photographs, disconnected from logos or brands or campaign messages, an observer is pushed to calculate the scale of a photorealistic image in relation to these settings. It is unclear if the images respond directly to the town, or if they presents new spirits in their midst.
For a town that is barely so, one considers the life here, where “there are only scattered huts, mountains, rivers, lakes, cows and other animals that roam undisturbed through the alleys.” Bifido adds to the public space with these images. Each is in a way similarly isolated – as are the residents of this place that was once full of the everday hallmarks of a healthy society.
In both portraits Bifido creates a poignant distillation of a moment – for anyone to discover and interpret on their way through Lozzi.
Bifido. Popularte Festival. Lozzi, Corsica. France. (photo courtesy of the artist)Bifido. Popularte Festival. Lozzi, Corsica. France. (photo courtesy of the artist)Bifido. Popularte Festival. Lozzi, Corsica. France. (photo courtesy of the artist)Bifido. Popularte Festival. Lozzi, Corsica. France. (photo courtesy of the artist)Bifido. Popularte Festival. Lozzi, Corsica. France. (photo courtesy of the artist)
The Ljubljana Street Art Festival 2022 edition has come to an end, with great flourish. We’ve been reporting on it here on BSA, and now we bid adieu to the uniquely creative organizers. They planned some unusual events and installations – painted with fire extinguishers and activated by fire, for example, or an extended definition of street art via phone assisted augmented reality. We particularly are gratified to see the conscious effort organizers and educators make to engage with the community and to open the experience of art on the street to adults and children.
With an informed balance of mind and heart, the festival presented an extensive program of talks, panels, and related social and performative events remain relevant and educational while entertaining. Screening the documentary Street Heroines – a documentary exploring courage and creativity in the female graffiti/street art scene – was undoubtedly a pinnacle, as was interviewing the intrepid director Alexandra Henry.
The fulsome academic program brought several speakers to examine the role of new technologies in the field of street art, the cross pollination of politics and sociological movements, the response “the street” has to war and propaganda, the intersections with sport culture, and the built environment as memoryscape. As ever, speakers and audience together contemplated our ongoing struggles to define the vagaries of a vast street art practice worldwide presents.
In addition to the presenters and participants in the program, we extend our congratulations to the excellent team of organizers and curators, to the talented artists and photographers, to the team of volunteers, and of course, to the host city of Ljubljana and their welcoming residents. Or special gratitude to photographer Crt Piksi, who shares his documentation here with BSA readers. Until next year…
From throw-ups to tags, banal to topical, paste-ups to high-gloss murals, the New York pays you back in grit and passion when you keep your eyes open. This summer the heat is on – and you really only need shorts, a tee-shirt, and comfy footwear to get lost in this city that is speaking to you at all hours and pouring poetic discourse into your head and heart. As hard as it may be sometimes, we are always thankful to be in a city full of people and artists that inspire daily.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Invader, Elle, Goog, Urban Russian Doll NYC, Homesick, King Baby, Miss 17, Cramcept, You Are Not Alone, Rambo, Dense, Beep Beep, Red Eye Mob, Crypto Compadres, and Dominator.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
