Street Art Sweet Art

This volume brings together over thirty of the most talented exponents of Italian street art.  These artists show the other face of the future: art that feeds off a pervasive aesthetic with roots in historical writing and the aesthetics of spray paint.  But it is also seeking new ideas and forms of mass communication, the techniques of “guerrilla marketing” as the most recent languages and techniques, ranging from stickers to stencils and the many forms of “urban disorder” that can be found everywhere in today’s cities.  Some of these artists are from the very first generations of Italian writers, such as Atomo, Airone, KyOne and Rendo, and continue through Dado, Joys, Wany, Phobia and Marco Teatro; others are part of a new wave of street artists: Pao (the artist of “panettoni-pinguino”), Pus, Sonda, Bros, Nais, Ivan the “street poet”, Blu, Microbo, Bo 130 and Tv Boy, to mention but a few.  Still others, such as Ozmo and Abbominevole, are artists who have taken their place fully within the “official” art system, though they continue to work actively on the streets.
Conceived as the catalogue for an exhibition being held at the PAC (Pavilion of Contemporary Art) in Milan, this volume a natural evolution stemming from the book I graffiti del Leoncavallo (Skira, 2006), a collection of the most significant works from the most famous Italian social centre.  Councillor for Culture Vittorio Sgarbi defined them as an open-air museum when he proposed legally protecting the walls and the graffiti so that they would not be demolished today only to be remembered with great regret fifty years from now.  This project ,which evaluates the work of these writers, has been strongly supported by Skira Editore and is aimed at showing how the white and innocent walls of the new city gave way to amazing images like flowering meadows on the vast surfaces of tapestries.  “They are illegal by choice: a priori - obviously; and also a posteriori since we need to defend them.  If they are ready to run the risk, with this rash consecration at the PAC, they risk being lost.  Their fate was not to be on the walls of a museum”.  (Vittorio Sgarbi)
Milan, PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea
8 March – 9 April 2007