Barlo, an Italian artist living and working in Hong Kong, sent recently some images of his latest mural in China.
Titled “Consecutio Temporum”, the new mural was painted at ID-town, a former industrial site that after being neglected for several years was adopted by graffiti writers and used as a venue for rave parties until a construction company decided to transform it into an artistic hub and place for events.
In the process, some of the former warehouses have been refurbished, becoming the home of artists and small families. Others have been rented as event venues whilst some of the houses remain abandoned adding some sort of post-industrial hipster vibe to the place.
According to Barlo, ID-town represents for him something unique, a place where both past, present and future coexist, and probably the reason why he felt it was relevant for his current research about the concepts of “atemporality” and holistic vision of the world.
“Consecutio Temporum” – latin for Sequence of tenses, represents not only a set of grammatical rules that show the relationship between tenses of verbs in related clauses or sentences, but also, in modern psychology, the relationship of cause/consequence of two different moments in time.
Taking a break from explicit symbolism, Barlo explores a somehow different facet of his work, one equally symbolic, but also more abstract embodying the relationship between past, present and future. Visible is the shape of a snake partially transformed into a blooming cactus that seems to embrace a piece of the cosmos floating in the middle of the composition.
Barlo explains his research as follows: “I have been investigating the meaning of such an idea in a time characterised by simultaneity and the lack of one unifying moral, making it impossible to understand the direction of the cause/consequence “vector”. What we are left with are fragments, human memories embedded within broken artifacts, materials forgotten and left behind, being claimed by nature, becoming part of the nature itself, blooming. Pieces kept together by our individual will, invisible emotional connections, forming a snake wrapped around the drape of space/time, making the consequentiality of events unclear, non-linear, and, therefore, mysterious. “
More about Barlo on: website | Facebook | Instagram
Thanks a lot to Barlo for the material and for taking his time to explain me the meaning of the work.
This post was also published on streetartunitedstates.com
Author: Fran
Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.
