Italian art: Agostino Iacurci's street art

Jul 16, 2016 1692

WTI Magazine #81    2016 July 15
Author : Enrico de Iulis      Translation by:

 

The last few years mark the beginning of a new "school" in the contemporary art. It's a current born in the metropolitan areas but now it's reaching important proportions even for the art market, albeit very late compared with USA, France and Great Britain. It is about street art. Artists start from a different number of assumptions and techniques: stencil, graffiti, traditional coloring as tempera and enamel, collage, etc. Many of the Italian squalid suburb areas are regenerated with embellishment, behind which lie always a deeper message.

One of the most fascinating street artists of the times is Agostino Iacurci. His art doesn't have many connections with the deformed writing of the writers, nor it lies close to the rarefied borders of the stencil. His style and his idea belong to the '20 and '30 of the XX century.


Iacurci stimulates the spectator's visual by using a planar graphics technique with saturated and flat colors. In the fashion world it could be named "color block". But it's even more! Its figures seem to be floating as if they were inflated with helium in a space created by them, with no dimension but full of personality.
In a seraphic calm our artist recalls unexpected spatial volumes form last century artists such as Martini, Donghi and Casorati, but he revives them under the lens of Pop culture and in the language of street writers. In fact, like them, lacurci unbalances the shape and flattens the perspective: he asks the viewer to locate the objects he is looking at, to search for the anatomical shapes, which in his works are embedded in a space solid but never overwhelming. This is exactly the same process that you perform in front of a work of a great street writer, who distorts the letters he uses until they become functional to the graphics of the object of art.


The shapes and its relations seem to have a vector ascent, as in the computer graphics of the beginning of this century: but in the taste emerges a great style setting of a hundred years ago, reworked in the extreme synthesis of juxtaposition of shapes and bright colors.


His distinctive trait lies in the fact that even if he belongs to street art, he never creates aggressive nor angry works. His strength comes from the decorative power, always pleasant and never disorganized, with many messages to be processed primarily in the analysis of human relations, psychology: the man who takes refuge in his own fantasy world to defend himself from the ultra modern.


There is also a kind of genius loci in his external works, a clear reference to the city or to the use of the building, which is then reported by the artist in an ironic and figurative way. In Civitavecchia we find "Il Civitavecchio"; in the old fish warehouse in the Roman borough Ostiense we find "Fish 'n ' kids"; in Gaeta we have "L'Arenato" (The Stranded) " and in Ronan Rebibbia prison we have "Punti di fuga" (Vanishing Points).


Agostino Iacurci is a modern artist. At the age of 30 he is already present in many cities around the world with his distinctive trait of irony, his very personal ratio of color-form, a recognizable and always enjoyable style, both in the external works in contact with the pedestrian / user / customer but also and especially with the small size works, which hold intact the spirit of self-deprecating neurosis of today's citizens, as his last exposure has been able to highlight. We will hear again a lot about him, in the future.

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