Ericailcane + Blu

Blu and Ericailcane are the leading Italian exponents of an important international artistic phenomenon that has emerged in recent years. This is a modern street art that we could define as “third generation” insofar as it follows the New York writing of the late 1970s and the explosion of graffiti art by Haring and Basquiat in the 1980s. Contemporary street art is a vast and complex phenomenon that is difficult to fit into predefined categories. With the new millennium, it has developed a cultural connotation of its own, questioning some of the fundamentals of ‘traditional’ graffiti art in terms of both form and content. Blu and Ericailcane have long since abandoned the spray can for the paintbrush, put aside the tag (the stylised signature of the writer) for a return to figuration as a vehicle for direct and accessible communication and, above all, have discovered the evocative power of the imagination as opposed to the limited iconographic apparatus – made up of lettering, trademarks, stencils, pop images – of the graffiti tradition. However, while not totally excluding incursions into public spaces or galleries, the two young artists have kept intact the abusive character of their first writing interventions, manifesting, in their choice of exhibition venues alternative to the art circuit, a specific desire to determine unprecedented forms of extended communication.

On the occasion of the ‘Ericailcane + Blu’ exhibition, Spaziorazmataz became a vehicle for the dissemination of an art that must unequivocally happen elsewhere. In addition to some unpublished drawings, the exhibition space in Piazza Mercatale presented three filmed documents illustrating the operating procedure and working methods used by the two street artists. The gallery space was thus transformed into the centre of an alternative operation. The surgical procedure has been changed not in order to remove, that is, to deport the artists’ creativity in the captivity of the exhibition space, but to reconstruct, in vitro, or rather on video, the conditions of existence of an art that needs a different landscape. The street is its indispensable condition, the gallery its contingent contradiction. In order to overcome the aporia, we have chosen risk; irregularity as the direction of a specific exhibition policy, aware that the neutrality of the presentation and the absence of commentary are the screen behind which a conscious complicity is concealed.

Curated by Lorenzo Giusti and Stefano Questioli.