Pongo
As a child, he showed a natural talent for drawing, constructions and colour compositions. Towards the mid ‘80s, during one of his father’s work in New York, he “meets” street art for the first time. The trips he took in the slums of the Bronx, that at that time were run by bikers’ gangs, had a huge impact on him. His rebellious spirit and his creative fever gave rise to his urgency to express and represent those very same atmospheres with aerosol paint. Everything around him was as much in disuse as very colourful. The tangled masses of signs and symbols, the rounded writings, the comic strip faces, were all prevailing facets that wiped away the decay to make room for his imagination.
The scene was totally different in many aspects, first and foremost the niche was narrow and the rap wasn’t like today; it was not mainstream. But it was in some ways more refined, MTV for example had its own MTV yo rap program, let's say there was no fashion.
What has changed? Basically everything is now a mainstream culture where graffiti writing has become a branch of street art.
That anarchic and vivid representation was the very culture that precisely at that time was establishing a new formal research also in Europe. The artists finding patronage within the “legality” of institutional galleries were Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf, who in 1984 also had a personal exhibition at the Venice Biennial. For the boy born in ’76, in his journey from the age of fantasy to the age of reason, it was impossible to remain constrained within the bounds of traditional schemes; his art was the Street Art, the one that also in Milan was starting to unfurl and of which PONGO was among the forerunners.
Shot and I went often in pairs bombing the docks and we did more than one per night. We used to meet after work at the restaurant going down to my basement to smoke and wait for the right time. When the moment arrived; we hit a platform and did another one on the opposite side of the city, often moving around the city. We saw the ATM patrols looking for us or running between one station and another because the alarm went off... but they always got late.
After his graduation from art school, the craving for scratching the town’s surfaces and the urban and suburban layers is greater than ever and soon part of his artistic baggage; as well as causing him more than a few brushes with the law.
PONGO is a “wildstyler” and as such he researches, designs and evolves the structures of the letters, of the writing and of the metropolitan images. His activity as a “street writer”, lasting several years until 2000, brought him to paint every conceivable surface with a special allure for rail and tube trains (though without neglecting the large suburban walls), turning him into one of the most prominent figures in Italy.
I reached a point where writing was no longer enough for me and I wanted to go further. Since then, in 2008, I started to develop my 3D style that is simply based on the concept of falseness and deception. From there, I studied and experimented various ways to achieve it and I ranged between painting on canvas, on the wall and pencil drawings as well as of course the Tattoo...
Very active both in Milan and at international level, he has taken part in gatherings and events throughout Europe while his links with the N.Y.C. ‘s scene became stronger. Becomes a member of the TNBs and undertakes an artistic alliance with the TATs, very famous historical groups already present on the New York scene as from the ’70s and considered the pioneers of graffiti.
Despite his commuting to and from the U.S., and his artistic collaboration with his fellow New Yorkers (not least that of 2010), his paintings on canvas and other materials go through evolving phases. With the new millennium, follows a period of deliberation which brings his interests towards philosophical research, nature and life sustainability on our planet. At present he uses painting as an artistic mean for operating choices which are useful to both his and others’ human growth and development , without ever forgetting, consistently with its past, his “frontier” experiences.
Word… Super cool stuff man.. 😎👌