Italian artist Fabio Petani was recently in Greece invited to take part of this year’s Athens Street Art Festival for which he painted one of his signature floral creations.
Called UNUNPENTIUM & CITRUS LIMON the new mural depicts the images of a lemon flower surrounded by two concentric circles; a white one that gives shape to the flower’s background and a red ring between this circle and the image around it. Both the red ring and the white circle in the center of the image are intersected by a contrasting sphere in bright yellow that draws our attention to the green foliage in the outermost background.
As in the rest of his work, Fabio Petani combines the image of plants and chemical elements characteristic of the area being in this case, Ununpentium indicated by the number 15 which refers to the number of the 5° Δημοτικό Σχολείο Κερατσίνι (Elementary School of Keratsini) school on which the work was created.
His murals express a fine balance between organic forms, geometry and lettering, always adding patches of earth colours into a composition characterised by a strong symbolism. He also makes use of delicate natural shapes and the symbology of natural elements such as chromium, platinum, americium and so on. Nothing seems to be random in Fabio Petani’s work. There is always some kind of connection between the depicted elements in his paintings and the composition, incorporating the numbers of the elements and even the colours when they apply. Each of these elements, chemical or part of the flora, is somehow connected to the environment or context they were created in.
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.
