“Hello amigos, how are you? Hope super fine! “
Argentinian abstractionist Elian is in Ekaterinburg riffing on a Russian rhythm of pop-hued panels. Well, except one. He calls the acrylic painting “Coloured Talismen and the Old New Spells”.
It’s impossible to imagine the contemporary built environment without considering the impact of street art and graffiti has had on not only city dwellers but our city’s designers and architects. While previous generations may have dismissed incorporating painting techniques beyond traditional frescoes or murals, the new generation considers it their birthright to bring modern art movement influences, including Optical Art, Kinetic Art, and straight-up tape art often used on the street.
Rome-based architect/designers Lorenzo Pagliara and Gianmaria Zonfrillo consider themselves a street art duo as well – creating under the moniker Motorefisico. Working on city walls for them is simply an extension of their interior/exterior design interests along with video art and installation art as well. In their recent façade-painting project in Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy, Motoresfisico says they employed stencil techniques sometimes used by street artists to create exacting lines and illusionist effects to enhance the architectural feature of this building with two facades.
“We developed our geometric composition directly on the surface by creating a huge stencil with tape,” they say, “This allowed us to create shapes perfectly adapted.” Monochromatic and modernist, the composition pops with a kinetic three-dimensional effect. Suddenly a white box boasts a pedestrian-stopping display of intelligent design, something that is not always apparent on city streets and even less often has it been achieved with simple stencil technique.
Naming their architectural installation “The Slash”, the artistic duo completed it in conjunction with the 8th edition of the Antonio Giordano urban art award (Premio Antonio Giordano).
Giulio Vesprini is expanding his niche from flat planes of basketball to take on the multi-surface skate park here in Civitanova Marche, Italy. The opportunities for expression in such a dynamic space are rather endless and he says for him it is “a meeting point between culture, sport and nature.” With a big skating community here in this city on the Adriatic sea, you can imagine that Vesprini is headed toward skatepark design stardom. For him, it is just another opportunity to put his work in public space, and then watch people interact with it.
Title: “N O C O M P L Y” / Struttura G055.
Credits:
Street Artist: Giulio Vesprini
Artistic assistant: Andrea Cimadamore, Alessio Beato, Roberto Monti and, Alessandro Pizzuti
Video e Photo Drone: Daniele “Cuk” Graziani
Photo W.i.p.: Andrea Rotili e Alessio Beato
Technical assistance: Cluana Color
Sponsor: Dashed Skate For Food ®
Many thanks to:City Hall of Civitanova Marche city Mayor: Fabrizio Ciarrapica. Assessor: Giuseppe Cognigni
Édgar Sánchez and Arcadi Poch may not simply be curators of the new initiative called Mexpania that merges the cultures of Mexico and Spain. They are social scientists, anthropologists, historians, and some may say, alchemists. With the inaugural installations of this auspicious project primarily created inside the entrance and with only 4 national/international artists, you may be curious how these foundational works will influence future curatorial choices for this ever-growing museum dedicated to urban art, or arte urbano.
The Museo de Arte Urbano de México (MARUM) has been steadily and organically evolving these last ten years into a bonified attraction in the center of Querétaro thanks to the existing remarkable architecture and the driving force of the visionary Sánchez. Now with a partnership focused on the 500-year history of the Spanish migration to ancient Mexico, the opportunities to visually capture and illustrate the modern identity of a common culture must be daunting, but they have begun.
“We are the fruit of migration and miscegenation, of love and conflict that led to the mixing of our blood,” say the authors of Mexpania’s manifesto. “From that union was born an uncountable multitude of identities, ways of being, thinking, and believing.”
As an inaugural set of events and art-making, Mexpania presents what can only be considered an initial attempt to draw upon those themes and present an opening salvo. A calculated project to establish this entrance to the formalized museum, one that proposes to document and celebrate the movement of monumental art through streets and cities. The selections are a deliberate mixture of styles, histories, and identities that confront our ability to parse differences and similarities and emerge with one unique voice.
“The feeling is like entering a contemporary temple, which transports you to a sacred place dedicated to the mestizo and migrant nature of humanity,” say the two curators of the freshly combined works on the MARUM campus, as they call it. “It has not been an easy task to generate what we understand as a single piece by making such different artistic languages coexist and getting them to dialogue in harmony.” Just reviewing the 33 muralists on the exterior spaces of the campus gives one an opportunity to consider the richness of this locally grown, now globally expanded, multi-voiced culture.
BSA is proud to be the first to present the new works in their new home and to welcome readers to regard these fresh murals in context inside an institution dedicated to urban art now rooting into the soil of one of the original forbears of the modern mural movement a century ago, Mexico. In a city visited on the streets by modern street art internationalists like ROA, Stinkfish, Jaz, Elian, Sens, Sego, Alexis Dias, Entes, Enter, Ever Siempre, and others – this too is the land that gave birth to the great muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, Aurora Reyes Flores, Elena Huerta Muzquiz, and Rina Lazo.
“Inside the venue, directly to the left, we see the introductory text to the project, calligraphed by the hand of the Mexican artist Jassiel Rivera and written by the two curators. Above the text, in the large circular niche, there is a joint work by four artists. It is a large X that represents Mexpania and defines the four elements of the whole being.”
“Our ancestors traveled the world and in different eras or by different routes, they arrived in what we now call Mexico. … Mexpania seeks to respect and question these identities, to propose cultural freedom as a path to urban peace. While observing human chaos, this work raises the banner of the dynamic beauty of our cultures. We believe that there is no absolute truth or a pure lineage and that the charm of life is born of our differences. 500 years after the first Spanish migration to ancient Mexico, we are privileged to explore the cultures that bequeathed us, create our own identities, and lift each other up toward a future of cultural freedom.” – Édgar Sánchez and Arcadi Poch. Curators.
SIXE
“Sixe, an artist of Catalan origin, occupies the two walls corresponding to the main entrances, the entrance, and the exit, with a numerical representation that occupies the entire surface. The enormous network in black and red is a symbolic and abstract representation of the data and events, loves and hates, pains, and hopes that emerged as a result of the great encounter between the multiple cultures of both continents. It is a contemporary codex, an abstract framework, in which the symbols of death are represented by skulls, the cross of the Catholic religion imposed by the Spanish, and other symbols that represent the balance of the cosmos, the new sun, and the eclipse of the civilization of ancient Mexico. We can also observe the gold coins that Daniel Muñoz incorporates in Sixe’s work, generating a dialogue between these two works.”
Daniel Muñoz
“On the front side and on the right we find the wall by Daniel Muñoz, a conceptual work with a great load of social reflection and critical thinking. Daniel talks about the power of money around domination and how it is able to make our cultures invisible. The large coin that presides over his work seems to cover the American continent and around the great circle, there are representations of the globe seen from different perspectives, creating a cartography of money. Behind the plaque that commemorates the inauguration of this space, and that contains an extract from the Florentine Codex, we observe a group of invisible indigenous women. Using these and other symbols, Daniel creates a representation of money as a motivation towards domination, but reinterprets its value with the phrase he writes around the central coin of the mural: ‘The Earth Will Return to Those Who Work It With Their Hands.’ “
Paola Delfin
“Directly in front of the work of Fusca, appears, in black and white, the work of Paola Delfin. Mictlantecuhtli, the lord of the underworld, presides, radiant over a chaotic swarm of horses, and from them emerge, on the flanks, two mestizo identities. This deity representing death reigned over the underworld through which the dead traveled. It should be mentioned that despite the difficulties that lie in the Mictlan, this was not hell but a challenge that had to be faced after passing away if one wanted to reach the palace that is found after overcoming the difficult journey. The symbols embodied in this piece seem to recognize the enormous pains and sorrows of the past as strengthening challenges, which can give us fortitude and inspire us to live with good conscience.”
Fusca
On the back wall to the left, Fusca uses timeless symbols to express subtleties behind the way we think. In moonlight-like colors, we see a representation of Coatlicue, the archetypal maternal deity of ancient Mexico, who as the legend tells us, gives birth to Huitzilopochtli, the cultural leader of the Mexica, who we still see on the Mexican national shield, represented by an eagle. This figure, who could be interpreted as the mother of Mexico, is intervened in such a way that an equine head instead of a serpentine one emerges from her neck. In this way, the deity and the horse are united in a single, mestizo figure. The piece expresses the emotion of living the fusion between different identities. These understandings of who we are can weaken or strengthen us. How can we better understand the past that created us to empower and liberate us? To build our own way of describing ourselves, to strengthen life in our future and that of our descendants?
It’s been a struggle to mount art events in the last year and a half for many reasons. That includes the 6th edition of GarGar Murals and Rural Art Festival in Penelles, Spain.
Instead of grouping all the artists and events and fans together for one short period of high activity, the organizers this year decided “to progressively invite the artists in smaller numbers so they could paint more confidently and feel protected from the virus.”
Now that all the 2021 murals have been painted, BSA collaborator Lluis Olive-Bulbena traveled an hour and a half from Barcelona to capture fresh paint! We thank him and we invite you to enjoy GarGar!
Click HERE to learn more about GarGar Festival.
Italian land artist/street muralist Gola Hundun has divided his creative projects in the last few years into two distinct but related practices.
The first is to investigate buildings that are being reclaimed by nature and develop site-specific installations that work in harmony with the history of the relationship between architecture and nature. The second, of which we have an example for you today, is a mural installation on active buildings within cities, perhaps invoking a more integrated ecology of symbols and natural systems around it. These two lines of inquiry comprise his project “HABITAT”, a sincere stream of research that lies on the border between anthropic space and natural space
Here in Milan, the school façade will now display Gola’s dedication to life and its movements – called “Convective Motions”. While the mural composition begins from a central element of cosmic energy, a solar force that unravels centrifugally outward, he also has plans to do plantings around the mural and the property in September to extend the reach of the painted portion of his installation.
“Leaves are painted as if they were part of a fire explosion, following and growing the movement,” he tells us, “generates new ones – involving celestial bodies upon contiguous facades, symbolically returning toward the central sun in a perpetual cyclical movement.”
When completed and grown, Mr. Hundun says the entire composition will include endemic plants grass, bushes, hornbeam trees, dogwood trees, hazel trees, hawthorns, and an English oak placed on an axis with the tree painted on the wall.
“The idea is to create a simulacrum of the wood that is used to dress this municipality of Vimodrone – all spread before the building,” he says. “The tree of life here is the same kind you’ll find monotheistic or pagan religions. The two trees will be set in two movements: the painted one will be crystallized, whereas the real tree will grow inexorably.”
This project is organized by industri scenica – INNESCHI festival in partnership with VIMODRONE City Hall sustained by Fondazione di Comunità Milano Onlus
Consultancy about nests by LIPU MILANO
Pics iranacredi
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week.
Can you feel the power of July’s full Buck Moon that arrived this weekend? Not to be confused with the full buck-naked moon; those are the guys climbing the fence to skinny dip in McCarren Pool.
Looks like the new George Floyd statue in Flatbush, Brooklyn got defaced by racists but will be restored and move to Union Square in Manhattan. The vandals must have been mad about all the confederate statues that have been coming down around the country.
You’ll be thrilled to learn that two self-driving cars were tested in New York this week, and no skateboarders or seniors were mowed down. The footage looks pretty tame, to tell the truth. Let’s try the test on any average drunken Saturday night and see how the rabble-rousers fare. Truthfully, a driverless car is exactly the way it feels taking a yellow cab sometimes.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Adam Fu, Adrian Wilson, Allison Dayka, Baston, Captain Eyeliner, City Kitty, Comik, David Puck, SEK@DX, Denis Ouch, Duel Heck, Flore, Foxito, La Plaga Invade, Lorenzo Masnah, Lunge Box, Rex Bantron, S. Cifu, Sinclair The Vandal, Sticky Monger, Sule Cant Cook, and Westgard.
For five years conceptual artists Biancoshock and Harmen de Hoop have been giving each other assignments as part of a common project that can range from titillating to amusing to incomprehensible.
As with so many works in public space by either of these two interpreters of societal nomenclature, these works field-test theories of the visual prank as much as they level observations or critiques of human behavior. With each installation, you are welcomed to examine one more of myriad modern idiosyncrasies – now placed in a new context. Your interpretation may vary.
The current chapter of their collaboration finds Biancoshock in the Corsican mountains for the art festival called “Popularte”, featuring artists including Bordalo II, Escif, Dan Rawlings, Elea Battini, and Julien de Casabianca.
Renovating an abandoned vehicle there, he transforms it into a so-called “Google car”, one of the Street View cars wandering the earth since 2007 to document for Google Maps. While many cities have been re-shot multiple times, some have only been shot once, and certain countries in regions including a large part of the Middle East and Africa have never been photographed at all.
Since de Hoop challenged Biancoshock to “Make a work about time passing”, the artist used his smashed sculpture to comment on the fact that rural areas often are represented by photos more than a decade old. Noting that Corsica’s streets have not been photographed since 2009, Biancoshock says, “In the cities, everything must be updated in real-time, in the small villages nothing changes so quickly.”
Learn more about the project at www.biancoshock-dehoop.com
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening:
1. Only Sydney’s Finest: Dave & Phibs
2. Toy Story by BAER, Parts 1, 2, 3, & 4
“Ralph Bakshi’s representation of good and evil wizards is the setting chosen by Australians Phibs and Dave to contrast their clash of styles. In this spectacular video, Colin McKinnon captures the process of this wall production carried out in Sydney.”
But Ma! — the music is what makes this epic.
Only Sydney’s Finest: Dave & Phibs
Toy Story by BAER
A promising hand-made 4 episode pilot about a mini-vandal racking and wrecking. Just don’t call him a TOY.
Summertime and the spraying is easy…..
School is out, unemployment is higher than they’re reporting, and your younger sister is driving you crazy. Time to take off with some friends to the local abandoned building for some summer spray-cation!
Maybe you’ll finally do that masterpiece, maybe you’ll just spray some genitalia or extremely large breasts. Since they are on your mind anyway, why not? These are the last days of July, you might as well carry on what has become a modern tradition for many urban youths over the years.
Who has a speaker we can plug into a phone? I want to hear my jam!
Thank you for these Barcelonian hidden jewels from Lluis Olivas.
For those who are nostalgic for the early days of the Internet and the pop of Lichtenstein shredded by the hands of Jacques Villeglé, here balances the bright fluorescence of Dante Arcade. The self-described urban and contemporary artist from Barcelona is here in Torre-Pacheco, a municipality in the autonomous community of Murcia in southeastern Spain, bringing the colors and swimming likening his street experience to the digital dreams possible in Photoshop and less fancy paint programs.
In a world where everything now appears in your life like a screen, his new wall for the Artate Fest is transformed equally so, complete with pop-up messages and layers of content piling up and interrupting one another.
Please clean up this desktop! That’s what folders are for, people! Honestly.
But for Dante and his multi-color soaked tableau, this is about love via the comic strip… one “in which you can interpret a romantic love scene in the purest Vintage comic style. An intervention that transports us the madness of the digital boom and the appearance of technology as we know them.”
Super Walls 2021 says that the theme of this year’s festival is “Rebirth” – which is in alignment with the mission of the public art project, bringing new life to Veneto, Italy with 38 urban artists of all stripes.
Street artist Mr. Fijodor selected this image of a burning cigarette on the ICS Briosco middle school sidewall to illustrate a larger theme and point to a culprit of the modern age: thoughtless, toxic consumerism.
“The cigarette is the iconography of a ritual gesture that many people perform daily, sometimes without even realizing it,” he says of the white and black burning column stained with yellow nicotine. “A practice dictated by a physical as much as unconscious addiction.”
The larger theme is portrayed in a horror of bodies, animals, plants and objects all being consumed mindlessly. In pursuit, you may ask, of what?
He calls the work “Consumerism Consumes Us.” Indeed during the fires that rage across our lands in summers that stretch further into the year, one may sense that this way of life is going up in smoke.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY