Toys
Solo exhibition, 2016
Viafarini, Milano (Italy)

Curated by Chiara Andrea Cima
Have you ever felt the feeling of being betrayed? Do you think it's fun to turn rebellion into cash? These questions thrown to the public before leaving the stage over 30 years ago by John Joseph Lydon known to all as Johnny Rotten - which marked the end of the Sex Pistols - are the same ones that drive CANEMORTO's creative path. This explosive “combo” launches an assault on the dominant culture and its conventions, fueling his legend, day after day, using all the necessary means. CANEMORTO use oil paint, engraving and spray with ease; the create installations, music, poetry, performances, videos. But on the street, their true and only “home” it is pure muralist brutalism, a term that indicates not only their acting in complete freedom, but also the feeling of being placed on the margins of the world.

If the artist, as per tradition, is an enemy of general sensitivity, CANEMORTO are a violent and voluntary immersion against power, authority, religion, but above all against the repression of desire. CANEMORTO's art resonates with an intense and multifaceted inspiration that does not come to terms; if on the street this turns into expressive violence, in the gallery it is a masterful exploration of their personal vision of art brut which has its roots in the vernacular, in the cartoons seen on television, in youth subcultures and in which an effect of irremediable drift prevails towards a universe populated by “misfit adults” never submitted to authority. CANEMORTO are against those who try to oppress the freedom to express their dissent to standardization, reminding everyone that art has never had anything to do with good intentions and/or morality!

What is art and what is not is a difficult, scabrous and, when handled by those in power, unequivocally pernicious question. The society we live in recognizes art and the artists by which it is produced - often - only when it reaches an economic value. Or - but not always - when the counter-cultural movement that generated and grafted change and innovation into the social fabric has ceased to exist. As always, it is difficult to recognize the seeds of a new adventure as such and be able to experience it in progress. Yet as we all know by now, art and culture are inventions and if artists did not produce them they would not exist. CANEMORTO, whose ironic and aggressively unconventional approach identifies itself with post-graffiti and outsider art, play to generate confusion around themselves, as they maintain their cultural roots firmly, deeply connected with the history of art, generating a very personal visual gap.

To fully grasp and enjoy the “vandal” art expressed by CANEMORTO, one must assemble together a multitude of fragments ranging from Barry McGee to Ema Jons, passing through Permeke, Markus Lupertz, Matthew Monahan, courageously sliding through Alessandro Pessoli, Kippenberger, David Lynch, Fischli & Weiss, Tilf & Blackwan and then descend even further into the depths of our unconscious where the world inhabited by Paul McCarthy and the Chapman brothers is found. Finally, ask yourself a few questions about what it means to generate a social and cultural bond within the environment in which you live, which surrounds you and often dominates you, trying in every way to trap you, rather than being a bond that generates freedom.

CANEMORTO are slaves of Txakurra. Txakurra is everything. Txakurra does not exist. Txakurra is the character of a creative experience in which form and style no longer have meaning, in which childhood memories and suggestions of rituals get mixed, born for the joy of surprising the unaware passers-by who populate the streets of planet Earth. Txakurra is probably a complex allegorical operation in which stories, characters, myths are connected in apparently arbitrary but poetically suggestive forms within a visual environment. Txakurra is a stray dog walking the street with a heart swollen with napalm. Txakurra lives between a rock and a hard place. Between the gall of some and the honey of others. In Txakurra the future of the public domain is vague, uncertain, but it will certainly be in full colour.

Giacomo Spazio


WATCH THE FULL VIDEO

Filmed and edited by Marco Proserpio
Written and performed by CANEMORTO
Audio recording and audio mixing by Matteo Pansana

Photographs by Jacopo Farina



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