All posts tagged: 12 + 1 Project

Ángel Toren & Joan Tarragó in Sant Vicenç des Horts, Spain

December 2, 2019 Artists

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. *“fight plastic portal”* Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona 2019 (photo © Clara Anton)

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.

Ángel Toren.“Infinite Space” Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona 2019 (photo © Clara Anton)

Size Matters: Octavi Serra Is In Search Of A Larger Wall in Barcelona.

September 23, 2019 Artists

As illegal Street Art morphed into legal murals we began to witness the entry of formally trained artists and professionals who not only abandoned the politically charged or socially challenging themes in favor of pleasant topics and commercial aesthetics but accidentally launched an arms race for the biggest, tallest, widest walls possible.

Soon the descriptions we received about new artist works shifted from discussions on themes and messages to statistics about square meters covered, the number of stories high the building was, and how many cans or gallons of paint were required to finish it.

Octavi Serra. *A Larger Wall Is Sought*. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, Spain. September, 2019. (photo © Clara Anton)

Spanish artist, designer, and photographer Octavi Serra would like a larger wall please. The one that Contorno Urbano gave him for their 11^th mural this year in Barcelona seems dreadfully small, and he has really big ideas. He calls this mural “Insufficient”.

Serra says his work often “focuses on capturing the irony, truisms and frustrations of modern life,” and while this piece is evidently meant to be tongue in cheek, he is tapping into a general sense of dissatisfaction that is part of a materialistic culture, and part of the human condition.

By letting the typography bleed off the edges, you also sense the claustrophobic feelings that are playing with the artists mind. “There is this feeling of never being completely satisfied even though reason argues that we should be,” he says. “There is this desire to always have more, which make the road impossible to enjoy.”

The mural is part of the 12 + 1 public mural project of Barcelona – at the Civic Center Cotxeres Borrell. Before the end of the year they are planning a collective exhibition where works by all the artists who have participated in the edition of the 12 + 1 2019 Barcelona project will be on display. The show will feature artists Jay Visual, Ivan Floro, Margalef, Anna Taratiel, Nuria Toll, Flavita Banana, Cristina Lina, Degon, Mr. Sis, Cristina Daura, Laia and Octavi Serra.

Laia and “Magic Avenue” in Barcelona for Contorno Urbano

September 4, 2019 Artists

Today we return to community murals for a minute, just to check on the progress of Barcelona based artist Laia. She says she started as a graffiti writer in ’99 at age 14, eventually gaining respect from peers for her serious skillz with tags, pieces, and style on underpasses, trains, walls, and freights.

I am Laia. *On The Way To Magic Avenue*. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, Spain. August 2019. (photo © Clara Anton)

Two decades later, she’s redefining her style, she says. Here you may think more of street art motifs and when you look at her new wall for community group Contorno Urbano in her hometown Barcelona.

See Laia’s graffiti- inspired works on IAMLAIA on Instagram.

She says she’s looking for positivity these days for herself, and she wanted to create something that reflects it to the neighborhood of Civic Center Cotxeres Borrell. Maybe something kid-friendly.

She’s calling it “Magic Avenue”. “There is no negativity, no sad colors, no violence!,” says Laia.

Cristina Lina: “Tommy” Cat and the Kids at Ferran Sunyer School

April 13, 2019 Artists

Yes, it is Saturday. It’s also #Caturday if you are a fan of the felines and you want to contribute to or simply scroll through the roughly 7.5 million photos with that hashtag on Instagram.

Cristina Lina. “Tommy”. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12+1 Project. Barcelona, April 2019. (photo © Clara Anton)

This Spanish cat named Tommy looks like he could have belonged to Matisse, due to the overlapping abstract collage method, but British artist Christina Lina says he was her grandmother’s cat – so we guessed wrong. The artist and educator often creates props, temporary sculpture, and installations for kids and places they frequent, and finds her work easily moves from public to private space and back again.

“My work as artist and my work as educator are not easily or tidily separated,” she says of her work. “Mostly I work within a sort of collapse between the two.”

This mural part of a public art program done in concert with local Ferran Sunyer school (so-named after the mathematician) in a neighborhood of Barcelona and students had the opportunity to create puppets during the final phase of the program.

With special thanks to the 12 + 1 walls program by Contorno Urbano.

Flavita Banana & Women in a Springtime Dance

March 16, 2019 Artists

With a nod to La Danse by Henri Matisse and many human tribes’ rites of Spring, artist Falvita Banana creates her new “Juntes sumem” (add together) here on the façade of Cotxeres Borrell in Barcelona.

Flavita Banana. “*Juntes sumem”* Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, Spain. (photo © Clara Anton)

Her illustrations have been in magazines, books and on public walls, often with the most basic and courageous technique at play; the simple stroke in monochrome. Humor, absurdity, melancholy all are intertwined. Here the expansive commanding of space and convivial craze infers the spirit as well as the movement of these celebrants.

But as with many of her humorous works, she says that this new wall completed Wednesday has a sadness – the clan-like closeness on display is for safety as well as intimate sisterhood.

This is a feminist ring-around-the-rosy says the artist. “At any time and situation, women have to be alert and united. We have to protect and help each other; unfortunately, even when we’re having fun,” she says of the jovial scene. “Above all, we have to remember that we are stronger together.”

Created in conjunction with the public art project Contorno Urbano in Barcelona.

Nuria Toll Paints Her “Veïnes” in Barcelona

February 16, 2019 Artists

Saturday fun today from local Barcelona graphic designer Núria Toll, who’s sort of new to the experience of doing murals and art on the street.

Translating her own history with illustration and typography, Ms. Toll finds that humor is a welcome antidote to the negativity that is produced by our invasions of animals’ natural habitats.

**Núria Toll.** *“Veïnes*”. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. February 2019. (photo © Clara Antón)

Here with “Veïnes” (female neighbors in Catalan), her seagulls are meant to remind us that the natural world was here first, and we should make a home for all of us. The seagulls are rather good at integrating, and Toll here is giving them their due.

Núria Toll paints here for Contorno Urbano, the first foundation in Spain dedicated to street art and graffiti.

Two Writers Walk Into a Tunnel: MUSA71 x Siro in Barcelona

January 29, 2019 Artists

Part of the experience of making art in the street is the interaction with people passing by. Other times it’s about being out with your mates or peers, hitting up walls that are near each other – sharing opinions, jokes, paint. Of course when you are in your own creative zone you also may be able to block out everything; people and sounds and smells. You escape into the paint, the movement, the physicality, the shapes and colors.

MUSA. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. January 2019. (photo © Clara Anton)

This month Musa71 and Siro hit a tunnel together in in Rafael Casanova in Barcelona, each painting their own piece. They say they liked it and today we have pictures from their dual project – which turned into a friendly competition.

Writing graffiti since ’89, Barcelona local Musa71 says she’s a self-taught artist who is passionate about the letterform and exploring a number of styles just to get an appreciation for ways to manipulate them while keeping them legible.

Galicia born Siro studied fine arts over the last four years here in Barcelona and he says that he spends a lot of time painting and tattooing.

“After 10 years of painting, I think I have already turned this habit of painting into my little shelter, into an escape route from all the rest,” he says in a press release. He wouldn’t be the first to admit to developing an addiction to graffiti and mural making – we’ve met many.

It’s good to see how these two artists work have some overlap – at least here in this tunnel in Barcelona.

SIRO. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. January 2019. (photo © Clara Anton)

Sant Vicenç dels Horts is a two-artist intervention courtesy of the Contorno Urbano Project. To learn more please go here:

BSA Film Friday: 12.07.18

December 7, 2018 Artists

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :
1. JonOne “Illuminier le Future” in Rabat with Montresso Art Foundation
2. ASU / Contorno Urbano / 12 + 1 Projects
3. COLOUR: Rolland Berry. Film by Aether Films
4. GDS from São Paulo crew Os Cururus in Montreal
5. Leonard Cohen, “You Want It Darker”

BSA Special Feature: JonOne “Illuminier le Future” in Rabat with Montresso Art Foundation

“I wanted people to feel what I feel: The joy of life,” says JonOne in this self narrated video that keeps the focus on the creative spirit and his new show “Illuminating the Future” in Rabat, Morocco’s capital, which rests along the shores of the Bouregreg River and the Atlantic Ocean. The kinetic action of his strokes and splashes are gestural bolts of energy at the top of this tower to be seen on all sides, an abstract beacon from this New York graffiti writer who metamorphosed into a Parisian fine artist.

ASU / Contorno Urbano / 12 + 1 Projects

“Leave the rationality of your brain and listen to your heart, what you feel, what vibrates,” recommends ASU the muralist painting the Contorno Urbano wall in Barcelona – as we wrote in September. Now comes the newly release video to give more context to his techniques as a calligraffitist.

COLOUR: Rolland Berry. Film by Aether Films

“America is dying because they forgot the instruction of how to live on Earth,” says the wise voice weaving across this minimalist tableau in monochrome and quietly thundering beats. Succinct, brief, hard hitting, well paced and scored – ultimately a missive of power and stark symbology from Aether Films.

GDS from São Paulo crew Os Cururus in Montreal

A uniquely spare documentation of the meditated, deliberate, and dangerous application of straight down pixação, São Paulo style, on the side of this Montreal building. How it is received in this northern part of the the Northern Hemisphere is not told, but as the drone camera rises to catch the cityscape, a mural by Kevin Ledo of Leonard Cohen in his old neighborhood of Saint-Laurent takes the stage and you may wonder how that man of letters would see these new symbols, now two years after his passing.

“There’s a lover in the story
But the story’s still the same
There’s a lullaby for suffering
And a paradox to blame
But it’s written in the scriptures
And it’s not some idle claim
You want it darker
We kill the flame”

Ivan Floro “Sacred Waters” for Kumbh Mela in Barcelona

December 1, 2018 Artists

Sacred Waters | पवित्र पानी

The Ganga and Godavari rivers feature the largest gathering of humanity every three years when literally tens of millions of visitors bathe in them peacefully and reverentially, in accordance with Hindu tradition for Kumbh Mela. People join religious discussion, sing, and see some of the most revered holy men and holy women there.

Import it to Barcelona, Spain and this image feels out of context. The sadhu (or saddhu) is a religious monk – a sacred holy man in India. But how did he get here for the month of November?

Artist Ivan Floro says he was considering the Hindu lights festival Diwali and the holy practice of bathing when he was creating his wall for the Centre Cívic Cotxeres Borrell. He calls it “Sacred Waters | पवित्र पानी” and his academic interpretation of his work is an evolution from his graffiti work as kid spraying abandoned factories. Now he studies the old European master painters and those traditions, bringing to fore this powerful piece that may be confusing to some who don’t know about the bathing holy practice thousands of miles from Barcelona.

“I thought about the clash of cultures there is between East and West,” he says, “how they understand life and death. We celebrate some of their rituals, but we could be shocked buy some others”.

This wall was produced with the Contorno Urbano Foundation – 12 + 1 Project.

Nulo Conjures “Supernatural” in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Spain

November 29, 2018 Artists

“In this artwork, nature and its forces are represented,” says the artist of the newest “12+1” project.

A recent act of extreme weather in Italy inspired this new mural in Sant Feliu de Llobregat by Lucia Pintos (aka Nulo) from Montevideo, Uruguay. A huge storm had devastated an entire forest, destroying thousands of trees, scattered like toothpicks across the mountains and land.

Nulo says that she thinks of nature as a balance of two forces: dynamic and static. Despite the power of the wind to mold mountains and transform landscapes, she also concentrates on the static force of the trees roots, which hold them in place until they snap.

In the face of such a torrent of power, she admires the countervailing power of resistance. Of the trees and mountains and stones, she says, “They don’t give up, they don’t fall, they don’t let the wind win.”

You can see these forces at play in this abstraction that may also remind you of earth science diagrams, but this one does capture the energy Nulo is going for, capturing “Two equal forces that, at the same time, are completely different,” she says.

Contorno Urbano Foundation – 12 + 1 Project

As FUNDACIÓ CONTORNO URBANO ends another year of their project called “12 + 1”, the community-based organization expands from one wall to four. Collectively they give opportunities to artists to paint in public and to the people on the street to appreciate the processes, techniques, and motivations that artists employ in the creation. The model for engagement is similar to many yet entirely separate from previous notions of public art: an engaged responsible program that is accountable to community yet still gives wide berth to the individual styles of the artists and their need to express ideas or experiment with new approaches.

Bisual’s Trippy Interlude with Drug Culture in Barcelona

October 16, 2018 Artists

BISUAL’s post-human sallow skinned characters are laboratory inventions that contain elements of animal, chemical, organic, electronic, psychedelic – minus the superpowers or sleekness of your typical cyborg. They also like to smoke something now and then while gazing at phones in a cartoon dystopia, a handful of helpers to mellow the menacing low-level paranoia.

The illustrator and painter has a history with graffiti as well, which may explain his ease creating casually comic surrealities on large walls in public space, like this new one in Barcelona.

The mural features leaves of the Acanthus mollis, a common and invasive species of plant, creeping up onto the street, blended with “geometric architectonic elements” he says. The pinkish protagonist may be pausing on his way to an errand at the liquor store, or he may just be waiting for his man, €26 euros in his hand. Certainly those psycheldelio creatures from the organic wild who are slithering with wide eyes slowly up to him are attentive to his actions, perhaps listening to his words. Not that he should be concerned of course.

Bisual’s wall is sponsored by the Contorno Urban0 12 + 1 Project, a community powered initiative to bring artists to walls in Barcelona.

ASU Calligraffiti and Contorno Urbano

September 18, 2018 Artists

“Leave the rationality of your brain and listen to your heart, what you feel, what vibrates,” recommends ASU, the muralist painting the Contorno Urbano wall in Barcelona this month.

ASU. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, September 2018. (photo © Alex Miró)

Since he was a kid the Franco-Spanish philosopher-artist says he has been inspired by sacred art and in particular the great pyramids of Egypt. As an artist he also looks at his work for a sense of balance, and you can see that here as he fills the forms with an evenly weighted layering of gold and silver calligraphy; yin and yang.

ASU. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, September 2018. (photo © Alex Miró)

He says that he enjoys the public interaction when painting and he had plenty of it during the four grueling days he dedicated earlier in the month here.

“I like to paint on the street. People talk to you, try to understand, bring you some snacks, something to drink. It’s very nice to receive this kind of generosity, kindness,” he says in his posting on Facebook.

Now we are intermingling the spiritual and mystical with snacks. We propose that to get your mind in the right place while looking at this new calligraffitied sprinkled circle, you may wish to think of donuts.

ASU. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, September 2018. (photo © Alex Miró)

ASU. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, September 2018. (photo © Alex Miró)

ASU. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, September 2018. (photo © Alex Miró)

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BSA Special Feature: JonOne “Illuminier le Future” in Rabat with Montresso Art Foundation

ASU / Contorno Urbano / 12 + 1 Projects

COLOUR: Rolland Berry. Film by Aether Films

GDS from São Paulo crew Os Cururus in Montreal

Sacred Waters | पवित्र पानी

Ivan Floro. “Sacred Waters”. Contorno Urbano Foundation/12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, Spain. (photo © Clara Antón)

Ivan Floro. “Sacred Waters”. Contorno Urbano Foundation/12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, Spain. (photo © Clara Antón)

Ivan Floro. “Sacred Waters”. Contorno Urbano Foundation/12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, Spain. (photo © Clara Antón)

NULO. “Sobrenatural”. Contorno Urbano Foundation/12 + 1 Project. Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Spain. (photo © Alex Miró)

NULO. “Sobrenatural”. Contorno Urbano Foundation/12 + 1 Project. Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Spain. (photo © Alex Miró)

NULO. “Sobrenatural”. Contorno Urbano Foundation/12 + 1 Project. Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Spain. (photo © Alex Miró)

NULO. “Sobrenatural”. Contorno Urbano Foundation/12 + 1 Project. Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Spain. (photo © Alex Miró)

Contorno Urbano Foundation – 12 + 1 Project

Bisual. Contorno Urbano Foundation / 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. Ocotober 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Bisual. Contorno Urbano Foundation / 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. Ocotober 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Bisual. Contorno Urbano Foundation / 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. Ocotober 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Bisual. Detail. Contorno Urbano Foundation / 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. Ocotober 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Bisual. Contorno Urbano Foundation / 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona. Ocotober 2018. (photo © Clara Antón)

Images from Bisual’s Instagram (© Jay Bisual)

ASU. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, September 2018. (photo © Alex Miró)

ASU. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, September 2018. (photo © Alex Miró)

ASU. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, September 2018. (photo © Alex Miró)

ASU. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, September 2018. (photo © Alex Miró)

ASU. Contorno Urbano Foundation. 12 + 1 Project. Barcelona, September 2018. (photo © Alex Miró)

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