Terun
I’m Daniele, born and raised in Palermo for a good 32 years. My love for drawing is innate, since childhood I used to spend my time with pencils and markers. However, the real falling in love came around the age of 12, in 2001, when I began to observe the first tags around my neighborhood. I didn’t immediately understand what their meaning was, but soon someone explained it to me. Thus began my first attempts at tagging. It was the beginning of a long journey that led me to focus more and more on the stylization of the letter: its shape, its components, the various fonts, the choice of colors, etc…
Street art doesn’t have a very long history in my city. Palermo welcomes relatively few writers, and especially in its early days, this precluded me from observing a wide variety of works and styles. Certainly the city context is important to derive cues and new ideas: the work in my opinion must “fit” the wall I choose and the surrounding environment, through a shape, a color, a background that best harmonizes with the rest. But this is unfortunately not always the case. Not all walls are usable at all times, either because they are occupied by other graffiti or because of unfavorable weather conditions, or because of the need for larger surfaces.
Certainly the technical and artistic skills are detectable by most people. I think the shapes, the color harmony, the cleanliness of the stroke, the overall harmony are the elements that come through the most. However, one must also consider that when talking about art, one is also necessarily talking about subjectivity: individual taste (of the artist and the viewer) plays the most important role. Obviously finding consensus in people looking at my works and reading their interest is something that makes me happy.
Until a couple of years ago, my activity was wedded to the concept of illegality. One used what the street offered and the time was short, but perhaps because of that the greater the satisfaction. The street gave me good memories, a fair amount of adrenaline, new friends and opportunities for comparisons. The legalization of walls pre-purposed for street art has certainly made life easier for us: it is possible to take more care of details, take advantage of larger and more numerous spaces, and make one’s works more visible to the city. From a more strictly economic point of view this is a positive factor; the exposure has also made it easier to do commissioned work.
