Tales Of Art is proud to showcase the first solo show of the Italian artist Edoardo Mendez, titled “RECUR”. The work of Edoardo Mendez is a reflection on the urban environment and the different aspects affecting the life of people living in it. Train station, local market, bus stop, gas station, cafe: they aren’t just the subject of the artworks but they are strictly connected to places where the artist pass by on a daily basis. The concept behind the show “Recur” is strictly connected with the technique used by the artist to make the works and the choice of the subjects depicted.

he artist’s research starts from an analysis of the real world, studying different points of view and ways to perceive the reality around him: the different chosen locations are reinterpreted with an elaborate and accurate artistic process, using different techniques and tools. Through photography Mendez captures and freezes in a shot the frenziness of the chosen place. The image is digitally re-worked and divided into different colours and depth levels, then transposed onto multiple linoleum blocks and finally hand-carved creating the matrices necessary for the linoprinting process. Once all the different layers have been printed on paper sheets, the artist starts hand-finishing each printed image, adding details and paint layers, different from each other, thus creating variations of the same images with various colour palettes. Once the printing and hand-painting process is finished, the linoleum matrices get destroyed, ensuring each artwork is unique and impossible to replicate again.

The idea to depict situations and places well recognizable to everyone but at the same time not contextualized in a specific time and space, gives the observer the chance to identify himself in the artworks and think about how he interacts with those places or how they affect his way of living, possibly revaluating his approach to daily life. They are common and strongly resembling places where everyone has personal life experiences, unique and different from each others, the same way the serial printing process gets enriched and becomes unique with original and hand-painted details and motifs.

Mendez work is also inspired by the idea of non-place coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé: if a place can be defined as historical, a meeting space, identity empowering, a non-place, on the contrary, is a space that doesn’t hold enough significance to be regarded as “place”. The non-places are not meeting spaces and do not build common references to a group, it is a place we do not live in, in which the individual remains anonymous and lonely.

BIOGRAPHY

Edoardo Mendez was born in 1994 near Ferrara, Italy. Since the early age he gets in touch and falls in love with the graffiti scene and immediately starts painting on walls with spray cans and brushes. Growing up and going to art school he start collaborating with other artists, joining the crew SCO originally from Turin, taking part in many graffiti jam around Italy. In 2014 he’s one of the funder of the artist collective VIDAKREI that today counts 10 members: Andres Belsito, Alessio BOLO, Alessandro Brome, Stefano Capozzi, Persona Generica, Edoardo Mendez, Paco, Paolo Psiko, TCB and Marco Travasoni.

After years experimenting as a graffiti writer, playing with lettering and de-constructing images, his work moved from the street to the studio, researching new and dynamic expressive languages, characterized by a personal artistic style and technique.

for info: [email protected] – +393299520887