Tag: Italy

Please, tell me a few words about yourself. When and how did you discover graffiti?
I’m from Italy and I started painting in 1994.
I was just a kid but I already knew graffiti, it really started when someone painted the school facade. That summer I met the authors and I did my first piece.
Twenty years later I’m still a kid.

– Your work is going more and more abstract everyday. Do you still have the feeling to write letters? Is the next step to go totally abstract?
– I always begin with writing letters.
My way of doing leads me to consider writing as an act of painting and painting as an act of writing.
I think letters are abstract themselves.

– Some of your latest pieces reminds some works from the fat315 crew from Ukraine. Who or what influenced or inspired you? How did you develop your very personal style ?
– Fat315 crew… I think their style is great. There are a lot of good artist in Europe, lately I enjoyed some works from Eastern Europe and Russia.
Philosophy, literature, cinema, architecture and artists from XX century is what mostly influences me now but at the beginning only a couple of local graffiti writers inspired me deeply… Omaek193 above all.
I have always considered graffiti as chances for changing in general. Sometimes I’ve moved ahead other times I’ve looked back but I always pay attention to the sign. It’s not only about technique: when I let the drips touch the ground or cover other materials, the piece seems to me real and unreal at the same time. I have developed Abik as a parody.

– What are your preferred methods of production and what materials do you like to use?
– During this last few years I have focused on strokes.
Basically I do a first monochrome layer with paint roller. When I paint walls in my town I wait for a few days or weeks before going back to the wall to make a second one. Sometimes I don’t come back at all. I like the fact that every step could work by itself… I want to feel time, for example in winter the weather creates some unexpected effects. I often use sticks to scratch the piece and eventually I add fast outlines… then I rest again…

– Which artists from Italy you like or could point out?
– Most of my favourite writers stopped painting at the end of the nineties… recently, I rediscovered some works of Lemon (Milan)… unbelievable.

– Soundtrack to your life right now?
-An evergreen: The Roots – Panic!!!!!
A new entry: Ionio – Talassocrazia

—-

Abik blog + Abik photo gallery.