You used to hire your cousin Vinny and his creative buddy who went to art & design school to do some sign-painting for the side of your warehouse so people who were driving by on the highway would know where they could potentially get air conditioners, filters, casings, and floor fans. And you would pay them mostly in beer and weed.
Things have changed. Now in Switzerland you hire guys who hashtag #urbancontemporaryart on their Instagram posting of the mural they painted all summer on the side of your factory. Also art exhibition curators who run an art blog will pontificate about the new paintings’ finer points, its cultural/historical references, and they will coo about how the composition works seamlessly in a “contextual” way with the Swiss mountains that the warehouse is nestled within.
Welcome to NeverCrew’s new mural on the side of this facility that will be a burgeoning hub for package traffic in the southern region of the country – where the artists Christian Rebecchi and Pablo Togni are from. They say that this mixture of industrial and natural landscape is where they took the inspiration from for this combination of a monochromatic industrial diagram and an earth-science illustration of minerals surrounded by a colorful hazy aura.
They feel like the environment informed their concept as well. “During the evening we could listen to the car traffic or the machines working on the right side of the wall,” they tell us, “and frogs, birds, and insects on the left side of the wall.”
As if visiting an art gallery, you ask the artists to explain the mural, and now you realize there’s so much more than a pretty picture here. “We were thinking about a symbolical net, a twine of transfers and projected thoughts, and as well we were imagining a production line that is both mechanical and human.” You smile because you realize that your cousin Vinny never said stuff like that.