The Spanish street art duo Pichiavo was recently in Lisbon in occasion of “Versus”, their latest exhibition at Underdogs gallery for which they also painted a huge mural in the streets of Santa Apolónia, near the Tagus River.
The piece is characteristic of their work, where classical painting and sculpture meets graffiti. The new mural shows ta stunning portrait of poseidon, painted over a background of graffiti throw ups painted by the artists themselves.
The duo is known for their ability to establish relationships between art, architecture, sculpture, space, and social contexts, adopting a highly attractive and performative focus, categorical in its artistic discourse and fully innovative in its fusions.
Working together since 2007, the two artists from Valencia reject the self-centredness of traditional graffiti in order to create a single individual oeuvre that deconstructs and blends motifs from classical art and contemporary urban art. Gifted with an innovative language, their practice conveys a poetics born of the artistic formalism of the street, transferring fragments of the wall to the canvas and vice-versa, following a markedly personal and original vision.
About the exhibition
Featuring a body of works that comprised both large- and small-scale paintings, drawings, and sculptures, PichiAvo’s first exhibition at Underdogs Gallery presented a scenographic setting that materialises the artists’ original dialectic approach based on a dialoguing combination between different elements that results in an entirely new visual landscape. Feeding off a “material tradition of pictorial production and physical intervention in spaces” that blends the ancient harmony of classical art with the calligraphic rebelliousness of modern graffiti, “Versus” is a visual journey that celebrates the atemporal nature of the creative act.
According to the exhibition text by Fran Picazo:
“Consciousness, being aware of the moment, or rather, of the moments of the transition in which one thing turns into another, adopting the attributes of its opposites, establishes for us an interesting conceptual interaction. For this exhibition we selected pictorial works that converse in the same space, which is divided into two distinct itineraries yet at the same time connected by a central installation that represents, in both material and spiritual terms, the fallen column of the Temple of Zeus, in Athens, and which shows the greatest of virtues, freedom.
(…)
A new aesthetic setting is created with a higher motive: to unite the indoor exhibition space with the space outdoors – the room and the street –, to redefine the dialogue between the two creative universes, constantly inverting their processes while still maintaining their essence. Implementing a single common concept that applies to the static certainty of the objects and the world that surrounds us.”
Unfortunately, the exhibition is over now running until yesterday at Underdogs gallery, but we got some images to share with you. Have a look.
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.
