Archive Exhibitions

From Pop to Street Art at Galerie L'Entrepôt

2011-07-14 12:50

What: Pop to Street Art
Where: Galerie L'Entrepôt
When: Mon to Fri 3pm-7pm, 12 July to 30 August

This summer, three artists are hijacking the warehouse that also happens to be one of Monaco's most exciting and innovative contemporary art galleries, L'Entrepôt.

Regular visitors may have seen their individual work before, but bringing them together is an inspirational idea. Common to all three of them is their infatuation with street art and graffiti. Combining popular characters and designs from comic-strips with techniques of street-art, the three artists together continually crisscross the traditional boundaries of art. Whether in monochrome or colour, acrylic, ink or spraycan, this is 'in-ya-face' art of the highest order.


^{Demon of the accordion Sebastian Innocenti plays at the vernissage 12 July 2011}

Andrea Clanetti Santarossa was born in what he describes as a smoky, stinking Venice and from a young age was influenced by the slew of popular culture that we associate with this kind of art: popular movies - especially Hammer horror films - graphic comics, Italian erotica (much of it prohibited in the 60s) - all played their part in the imagination of the young artist.  "People are simple, but endlessly fascinating", says Santarossa. "My portraits are a combination of fictional and real images - Spiderman, Mandrake, the Invisble Man - but also posters, adverts, everyday things. I mix several media such as oil, charcoal, watercolour, pastel, wax or enamel and work on canvas, wood, and other surfaces." But always, adding atmosphere, are those wisps of Venetian smoke.


^{Andrea Clanetti Santarossa: Invisible Man}

For ELFO, born in Brescia in 1982, it's large scale aerosolling that inspires. He likes the changeable nature and expressive 'metalanguage' of spraycan graffiti - and the fact that the wall is more than just a canvas for spraying on: it's an integral part of the art itself. He's fascinated by the degraded world around him - not just the urban environment, but people, creatures, objects - and they all find their way into the artist's creative process.


^{ELFO: untitled}

Benjamin SPaRK is a Franco-Belgian artist and painter living and working in Brussels, whose work is made up of a series of spooky characters derived from the universe of strip-comics, caricature and advertising as well as ancestral symbolism. SPaRK is a driving force of 'street pop' culture, a movement that grew from a synthesis of European urban art and of American pop art. The artist is emerging as the powerhouse of 'Street Pop', a movement that deliberately combines American pop art with European urban graffiti. His designs adorn both Paris and Brussels: 'It's the large scale and brutalist aspect of it all that attracts me,' he says. His inspiration, he admits, borders on the obsessive; and super-heroes and monsters have never ceased to influence him - from childhood to the present: 'Cartoons taught me everything: fear, good and evil, as well as humour.'


^{Benjamin SPaRK: Rain on Me}