A true graffiti jam is still possible. This location in Barcelona, the Plaza de las 3 Chimeneas, is a platform for an ever-changing collection of works by new and established practitioners of graffiti, street art, and urban art. How many times have visited a local ‘Wall of Fame’ to find many of the same artists again and again, as if they are hand-picked by ‘kingmakers-queenmakers’?
Over the last decade we have featured this unique venue many times on many different occasions, thanks to photographer and BSA collaborator Lluis Olive Bulbena.
We’re happy to discover the democratic spirit applied to admissions of artists and writers time and again; to see new and emerging styles, political screeds, memoriums, handstyles, portraits, illustrations, text treatments – the gamut of voices that are all part of the greater Barcelona scene and beyond. It is reassuring to see that a scene that can be rebellious against institutional classism and clubby corruptive influences is also not falling prey to them.
This jam was organized by the Periferia Beat Festival, Lluis tells us. “They brought together a group of about 40 artists for a day of art, painting, and sharing stories among old friends.”
“An archetypal image”, Edoardo Tresoldi says, “is capable of creating a dialogue between past and present, using a language comprised of meanings that recur over time.”
Again he tarries in this trade: the recurrent symbol or motif in architecture lifted from its source and presented in wire and light to evoke hallowed, revered spaces elsewhere. It’s a stunning realization that your emotional rapture is triggered in some way, insignificant or profound, by this relatively simple recreative act.
Opening this week at the Art Museum of the City of Ravenna, Tresoldi re-calls his piece called Sacral for an exhibition called “Dante. The Eyes and the Mind”. Viewable until January 9 the installation occupies the eye of your mind, the central tenant of this Castle of the Great Souls. According to Dante, this central location – pivotal, buoyant, luminous – “is a symbolic place inhabited by the souls of those who left honor and fame behind them on earth. They are the great souls of antiquity – philosophers, poets, scientists, and writers – with grave and slow-moving eyes.”
We’re pleased to help readers gaze upon it and see what essence has been captured from the 16th-century cloister that is relevant to our present – or at the very least, inspirational to it.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
