Image slideshow
Time for you to start dreaming more often. Time to start picturing a different city in your head. A different universe. Where YOU are the one who turns it into the landscape you fancy. Who transforms it In An Absolut World. To help you get off your ass we asked a few great visionaries to lend us their colors and mix them into an “urban wallpaper”, an upholstery which we could all use to try and recover the gray wall facing our bedroom window.
What we want is that a “vision” stops being just a dream and turns instead into a gaze: your real, everyday’s gaze. And when in the world’s top galleries you can find those writers and street artists the most short-sighted used to label as “criminals”, well… what’s wrong with believing you too can take at least one single wall of your own city back?
We gathered a group of visionaries (the last of whom is Ozmo) and we borrowed their eyes, colors and ideas. People who see a blank canvas where we only perceive a wall or a gate. And we asked them to create Absolut Wallpaper, a proper “urban wallpaper”. The easy and ready to use solution you always wished you had at reach every single time your city slammed the worse of itself right in your face.
The artistic background of Gionata Gesi, born 1975 in Pontedera, is enclosed within the path which led him to be fully identified with his streetname: Ozmo. While Ozmo takes off from the world of comics and quickly gets to trains and walls all over Italy, Gionata goes through all the stages of the "official" education, at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts first, and an MA in Visual Arts in Como right after.
The two "souls" rejoin in 2001 when Gionata settles in Milan and becomes one of the pioneers of the Italian street-art movement. While his provocative iconoclasm gathers awareness at art galleries, the city walls (and most of all the one right outside the Leonkavallo squat) get covered with his works, in which the traditional spray can meets new media such as stickers or posters. Nevertheless: «I've always liked to wink both at "high" and underground culture», admits the artist today.
Ozmo operates like a hip-hop producer would: he observes the reality of today's cities and its contradictions, then "stealing" small meaningful portions of it - exactly like you do when sampling music - and eventually connecting them together like letters of an imaginary urban alphabet. Yet how will his In An Absolut World be? «I wanna create an atypical wallpaper, remixing almost in a random way the images users will send us via the website. My Absolut Wallpaper won't work with the repetition of elements, but it will have its own stylistic homogeneity. And it will be circular!». What does it mean? Ozmo doesn't answer. You, as well as we, only need to wait. And engage...
For his Absolut Wallpaper project he thought of a composition of elements obtained with the contribution of participants to the web contest You Wall 2.0. The sharing and the remixing of sources and the site specific performance are part of his way of making art. Through these instruments he takes fun on acting on the language of symbols and images in order to arise in viewers mind the following question: "What am I actually looking at?”
He recontextualizes the “world” of proposals, weaved, mixed up or opposed between them, he moulds and conceives his personal In An Absolut World and brings greek mithological figure Atlas to sustain it!
In addition, DRAGO brings you an exclusive preview of images from LE TEARE that will be popping up soon in London and New York: ABSOLUT BULLET PROOF.
In an ABSOLUT WORLD everything would be bullet proof...