QWERTY, the name given in the 19th century to the typewriter keyboard, still defines the system of the digital alphanumeric keyboard.
UNO is an artist who lives and works in Rome since 2005. The techniques used in his artistic production are the classics of street art, although his preference, right from his first experiences in the street, are posters, repetition, collage, decoupage, stencils, and anything that has to do with paper and its manipulation, with the streets and the ephemeral, with the perpetual and incessant need to roam around burning the midnight oil.
By assimilating and actualizing the lesson of Warhol, Debord , and Rotella , through endless repetition and frequent use of fluorescent spray paint, UNO plays with the advertising techniques and transforms them. Focusing on the face of a famous chocolate advertising, he turns it into an icon of the possible revolution of the individual against the mass society. A face freed from the role assigned to it by its creators and that paradoxically becomes the ideal tool for a critique of the advertising practice itself. Reinforcing this message his decoupages with torn paper and stencil-collages, that remind us of the individual and his uniqueness, continually manipulated until lost in the multiplicity of society.
One hundred thousand , no one , UNO.
It seems that the past and the bridge it throws incessantly towards the present are the key to this exhibition of the street artist UNO, that on this occasion leaves aside his favorite support, walls, and chooses the paper to focus on a more intimate and unrevealed side of his production.
Hidden behind what looks like a linear exercise of classifying letters and graphic designs it seems to be rather a manifesto, an essential outline of the signs and references that have always been part of the poetics of this artist: Pop Art as his favorite playground, with continuous references to seriality and to advertising, is clear in the declination of each letter in possibly endless typefaces and patterns; The component of fun, here in the implicit invitation to play and discover the more or less hidden references in the works; and finally childhood as the dimension of his entire artistic practice (the leitmotiv of his work is the face of a famous advertisement for a chocolate for kids) that takes shape in the structure of the whole exhibition that resembles the alphabet posters that hang in first grades.
So the qwerty keyboard, essential instrument to our relationship with the world, becomes the excuse UNO finds to compose an anthology of his stylistic alphabet, an alphabet that breaks out on paper like multiple windows of a crashing software.
What is not clear is if his intention is to make us learn or unlearn this alphabet, to celebrate it or just to observe it. Certainly what he’s asking for is to take a trip through eccentric palettes and paper planes to get to a safe but at the same time dynamic space, that speaks of modern aesthetics but also of the archetypes on which it’s based, and that like a Proust’s little madeleine opens up sudden glimpses in our emotional memory.
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