our british friend Word To Mother spent 7 hot days in town, as soon as he got here a very sweet old man agreed on letting him paint the side of his house

him and his wife were on their 70s’ and they were both beautiful and sweet. it was a breath of fresh air to hang out with them on their roof and a pleasure to hear all their stories. as soon as we were finished being hosted by such a lovely couple we were all in a great mood and we decided to go and paint an illegal wall

it was inexplicably easy to paint it and nobody was bothering us until this random guy popped out of nowhere screaming at us that we fucked his car with paint! now, true that he was not good at talking as he could only scream (IMAGINE IF YOU COULD JUST WRITE IN CAPITAL LETTERS) but the guy was a true genius at physics! he had stipulated a innovative theory of winds - in situ - wich asserts that a gust of wind, if well pissed off, can carry a drop of paint and keep it intact for more then 30mt if there is a new Audi to hit on the other end of the road! the situation was turning into a real nightmear and his 20 friends were encouraging him to get fisical to defend his brand new theory…what a weird nightmear was that, there is really no point in me telling this story if not to post this video from spike lee’s “do the right thing” wich illustrates it so well i had to introduce it properly:

too bad we had no faults here and our twin story didnt have the same happy ending spike wrote for his movie… it ended up with me paying the repairment of the car off the glorious festival budget to make sure we could get over it soon and we wouldnt get our ass kicked by an equipe of 20 unsuspected physics in caps lock mode on…
anyway, word to mother finished the wall

and all the crew moved to the studio, where he could create an insanely beautiful work of crafts for his installation at the gallery

and get us busy on a lovely screenprint wich he handfinished with watercolors later (it will be available here soon)

this one above is the last piece he did downtown. we could hear people upstairs eating and watching tv while their old rusted metal panel downstairs was baing carefully painted. this, togheter with the thousands preciousness of the man himself is the thing i love the most about Word To Mother, he’s always looking at weird bits around, he’ll stare at things that you’ve passed by everyday for years but you’ve never actually seen them.

i guess it’s a way to reveal the beauty of unnoticed things, make you realize about their existance as single objects and finally make you wonder about their history. they’ve probably been there since way longer then you have and you’ve just assumed them as part of the setting. personally, i take it as a chance to explore every little piece of the landscape we’re in, to get to know it better and, eventually, to love it more.

while three critically “egoed” artists pulled out from the festival saying that they were “busy” i’ve had the pleasure to host for the third year in a roll the sweetest Lucy Mclauchlan ever

she did three walls, this huge one was in a weird spot, the road was bloked off and we had to fuck with fences all the time to get in

luckily, everybody in the neighbourhood was super kind and into the painting so that nobody called the police, they were offering us drinks and food all the time and they all helped us a lot. once she finished this one, we decided to go for this smaller and totally illegal one

she painted it in just two days and again, all the people in the district were really happy and friendly, they would come down with cold drinks and chat to us, commenting this or that piece and showing great partcipation

i guess i can say that people in Grottaglie are finally realizing what this all is about, we’re just doing beautiful paintings around, there are still dickheads who would bother us but we’re definitely going in the right direction here. that makes me happy

a huge thank you to lucy for being so cool all the time and to claudia and her family for helping us and offering us so much support at the big wall.

now, to go back on the artists pulling out topic, it’d be nice for everybody to finally realize that there is no point being jealous at artists, it just looks like they are more free then we all are but that’s a massive lie!
few of them are, few others could be, but for my personal experience, most of them are as work-slaves as we all are.
the best thing in being an artist is that you’re doing what you like to do all the time, but sometimes you have a boss as everybody else, your gallerists, the art market, they’ll drive you crazy if you’re not able to walk back and think. you can even get as far as seeing yourself as your own boss and wow, that’s the point where you should start hating yourself

to get to a point, i’d say that the only way artists are more free then the rest of the world is through this weird common idea that an artist is an artist and as an artist he/she can be crazier then the rest of us, which translate in: i’m an artist, i can do what i want, i will fuck with you all.
yeah right, fuck it!

while Lucy Mclauchlan and Erica il Cane are in town studying their walls i took one minute off to publish this lovely video by MOMO

Travelouge from MOMO on Vimeo.

and some more pictures from Os Gemeos’ muñecos invasion

this last one scared the owner of the place but makes everybody else smile

i’ll come back soon with pictures from lady Mclauchlan

today is definitely one of those days where running a blog is a real issue, i’m here to show you what sam3 did in the last two weeks and i’m supposed to do it in english, which is very far from being my mother tongue. my approach to english is as cerebral as mathematics is. to finish an entire post in english, trying to give it a proper sense it’s like closing a very hard calculation, trying to get to the one right result.

well i guess Sam3’s work does not really belong to mathematics, so i’d better let it speak for itself first

now, i remember the very first time i bumped into his work online. at the time, i was thinking that he could not draw, i thought it didn’t matter how hard he was trying to make it look good, there always was something wrong in the anatomy of his shadows and what i was seeing just looked like a poor “good drawing” try to me. i also thought that the use of his monochrome figures was a necessity rather then a choice. stupid me, i suddenly realized how much of a dumb internet surfer i had been, not paying enough attention and looking at his website between three or four other random windows, evil facebook included.

it was watching his animations that i finally figured that whatever he does is inscribed (to borrow a term from math) into his very specific and solid aesthetic, humor and style. moreover, the guy can actually draw very well!
he’ll probably hate me for saying so, but sam3 is definitely the most romantic artist i’ve ever met, that’s why he does not need accademic anatomy or other colors than just black and white. he just needs to go and do it

in only 10 days he did these two walls above, he worked hard with ceramics

and he did an animation based on his deep studies of the solar year and equinoxes in which a wall painting interacts with the shadow of a drawing in the same way just once a year, on the 21st of june, also known as the summer solstice day.

and so on and on…

this said, i will tell you how funny he can get while he collects wood from the trash can and the trash workers show up dressing the same colors, confuse him for one of them and trhow his woods into the trash truck,

i will show you how he enjoys going around to make some quick pieces involving local street kids (this guy below is the very famous tic & tic)

and i will tell you about that night that he made everybody happy with his tasty home cooked paella

what about a little thin advert now here?

you can BUY “Sombras” here, a book here containing a selection of sam3 works from the last 4 years here. you dont even have to bother reading it here, it just contains nice pictures !

here very special offer for this week only : BUY 1, GET 1!  here

talk soon here!

and here

king momo did 12 days of crazyness at FAME festival. he did five walls!

i’ve been in love with his work since the very same moment i came to know about it and even if i knew it was going to be very different from the usual FAME figurative aesthetic i’ve never had any doubts: he rocks! i also had the feeling that he would have liked weird walls better then flat white walls… what i did not know is that he would have gone for these impossible to paint surfaces,

that he would have liked to interact with pre-existent graffiti weirdness

and that he also had advanced gardening skills to rely on…

after filling a full sketchbook

he also found time to paint a big fresh wall in the heart of the ceramic district

and only after me and the guy with the blurred face (a famous local goat rapist who cant be shown for practical reasons) threaten him with this video

he agreed to go to the studio and paint some screenprints

what to say, the guy is a guarantee of positivity, fun and wonder. that’s why this post is so long and the website almost looks like his blog now. big up for momo!

i swear i did not want to be boring this time, i swear, but i have a story now and i find it really hard not to tell you about it…
so…

the brazilian artist Nunca was painting this big dude on a facade downtown,

it was really hot, with peaks of 35° (celsius) and the wall had this nice touch of burning sun on it for the whole day (the whole week actually). Every now and then, this other dude in flesh and blood, was coming to visit us and chat a bit about the drawing and the content of it. He lives on the other side of the street and he was coming down to throw away some soil while gardening on his balcony. he was really nice and had a very kind attitude, wich is pretty rare these days, especially if you’re painting a huge wall in a place where people are scared of changes and any sort of non-ignorable news.

when the painting was finished, this charming man showed up again and told us that he would miss us, and that it had been a pleasure for him to see us painting on the other side of the street. He also finally gave us his interpretation of the piece saying that, working on the land, you can finally find resources and opportunities.

well, this guy, is the ex-mayor of Grottaglie, the one that togheter with the council made agreements with the trash company that built the very famous dump right outside town. hiding all these decisions from the people.

now, dear mayor, thanks for the kind words, i hope you’ll find some time to consider my own interpretation of the piece too:

you can make big big money from our land

you just have to fuck with it first

you surely know it better then me though, you guys have fucked it really, really, hard

one of the main cultivations here in Grottaglie is Olives, there are thousands beautiful threes in the fields and some of them are more then a hundred years old

one of the main shapes of our ceramic tradition is the ivory dish, the artisans of the ceramic district handcut little sponges to sop em up in ceramic ink and paint the blu stars along the borders while the ivory glace is still fresh on the terracotta

another thing that made our little town famous in these last years is our special wastes dump.

southern italy is in real deep shit with the trash business (seen this movie ?). Grottaglie did not need the dump at all and people in town were not given any warn before it was already being built. guess how come?!? now we have trash coming from very far away and the dump seems to get bigger and bigger, there already are three huge lots full of trash and trucks get here daily from northern europe to deliver more shit.

this piece comes in the very right moment, considering that there are workers diggind another huge hole in the ground near the dump. there are reasons to believe that they are going to create a fourth lot and again, our formidable town concillors are not telling anything to their own people. how morbid is this?

italian readers can find a lot more infos here

now, being this is a very personal interpretation, i’ll leave you to the full picture, so you can get your own idea about it.

something is telling me that the local press, who is now getting interested in the festival, wont be talking much about this one, just another little alarm bell ringing…

grazie blu!

well well well, many things happened in the past two weeks, i’m going to show you their kinda unexpected happy ending…

the brasilians came here and did a lot of pieces around the city, these are just part of them, you’re more then welcome to come and see the rest in person down here!
the twins improvised this muñecos invasion even if everytime they asked me “tienes permiso para este muro?” i was giving them weird answers that all lead to a very evident “no i don’t”. this is what i really love about Os Gemeos, these guys are keeping it very real.

we also went to the beach and had amazing meals at my mom’s, they loved her food so much that they’ve painted this little kid tagging her name

how sweet is this?

on another note, you guys should check out the website of the other festival we’re doing in Lisbon - Portugal. It’s called CRONO and it will be running for one year, we just completed the first season with Blu, Os Gemeos and Sam3

have you ever heard of people falling asleep on the stencil they have been cutting for the previous three days?

this was cut, painted and in the end scratched on a wall in the very centre of town by Vhils and a few untrained assistants

between the deep stencil cutting sessions, i’ve been able to force the artist to work on some newer editions, this was a two colors screenprint, then we figured it had been too easy and we painted it again with some blu ink

then again,  the blu was too blu and Vhils went on it with some bleach to make it disappear, in favour of a weird burnt yellow here and there

this is what it looks, before and after the bleach painting

we’re really happy of the results, i’ll post more pictures soon
thanks again to vincenzo parigino, carlo garpo and totore giocherello for the precious help

more infos later

there is this saying here: “vedi napoli e poi muori” (see naples, then die)
i guess it’s about how beautiful the city is. Napoli is, indeed, my favourite city in europe.

well, i’ve been there quite often last year and i survived.
if you’ve been there too, you’ve certainly noticed that these guys, Cyop e Kaf, are the most prolific artists in the city. They paint, they paste, they are involved in “monitor” magazine and they do a lot of shit staying positive and keeping a very fresh and spontaneous attitude.

the images above are part of what they did here in just 4 days

the guys have a very original imagery and style and they work togheter passing the brush to each other, we’ve also been doing prints wich will be released soon on studiocromie, this is a little sneak preview

in the meanwhile.. Vhils got here and we’ll be in touch soon