Francesco Barbieri "Terra Di Nessuno" Solo Show

"No Man's Land" is an abandoned railway area, space under a junction of the ring road, a tunnel, the interstitial between two dark subways. No man's land is the main subject of the painting of the former "graffiti writer" Francesco Barbieri. From this border area, the artist has learned to observe and see everything that surrounds him with a critical sense but also with enchantment, carrying trellises, antennas, palaces and opalescent skies spilled with smog into his canvases. CRITICAL TEXT OF CHRISTIAN OMODEO When, in April 1992, sociologist Marc Augé published in France "Not places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Surmodernity, "one of the fundamental texts for analyzing the relationship between human society and urban space in the contemporary world, the country still discussed a fairly unusual chronicle. Only a few weeks earlier, the Louvre subway station - recently refurbished and adorned with copies of statues kept in the museum - had in fact been targeted and vandalized by spray-gun bombs from some graffiti writers. Newspapers and televisions gave ample space to the swarm on that occasion, presenting the contemporaneous approval of the first anti-scratch laws as proof of the effectiveness of the institutions. At a distance of years, it is legitimate to start a re-reading of those measures and wonder whether the introduction of those norms did not trigger an increase in vandalistic trends in the French writing graffiti of the 1990s and 2000, instead of wiping out the impact. To deny the graffiti the right to be present in the public space was one of the main signs of the refusal of public institutions to deal with the emergence of new urban cultures and, at the same time, the testimony of an inability to bring about the new theoretical framework made available by studies such as Marc Augé. In the fall of 2005, while the suburbs of some French cities were being caught by bands of unemployed young people, twenty years of fidelity to those guidelines laid down in the early 1990s was regarded by many as one of the main causes of riots of the banlieues. Others, such as then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, reduced everything to a banal reprisal of boys born and raised in dormitories unable to share the Republican spirit. The public debate quickly polarized around these two fronts, hampering a serious political analysis of the situation and the resulting leaps of possible reforms. It was in this context, while the French media daily dictated urban guerrilla stories that the enormous photographic portraits of those same boys who were soaking up the banlieues appeared on the walls of noble palaces in the wealthy neighborhoods of Paris. Medium-large printers portrayed halfway between the funny and the aggressive, to irony the distorted image of the French suburbs offered by the media and part of the national political class. "Portrait of a Generation" is still one of the most emblematic projects of street artist JR, but is above all the first attempt by this ex-graffiti writer to arm a new language, based not on the spray can on the interconnection between digital camera and plotter printer. Offering his own idea of ​​the relationship between human society and urban space had now taken over the search for a unique style for his own letters. A new search field, everything to explore, saw the day. The urban landscapes of Francesco Barbieri are difficult to assimilate to photographs of JR. However, they share with their work a somewhat similar need to convey a precise way of seeing and living urban space, typical of those who have spent in graffiti writing. In the case of Francesco Barbieri, a collective imaginary has been removed and made up of glimpses of invisible cities in our eyes. Its landscapes are centered on urban areas that our gaze ignores consciously. They are geographic maps of a surrounding world that we are self-reproaching, almost like photographs taken with a smartphone's eyes closed while we're on a city train or subway. "Nobody's Ground," the title of this exhibition, is a prelude to the unreal relationship - driven by the only artificial desire to consume or transit - that many have with urban space. He assumes, later, a claim accent, because Francesco Barbieri educates the eye of his viewers and invites them to rediscover the beauty of those urban spaces so far excluded from their gaze. The dreamlike tone of many of his compositions recovers those investigations aimed at revealing the soul of urban spaces,Guy Debord and Situationalists were baptized in the 1950s with the name of psychogeography. The intimate relationship with some corners of the city, however, goes back to the walks described by Japanese designer Jirô Taniguchi in The Walking Man. His lyricism, however, recovers that sophisticated and silent relationship to the urban space typical of the first photographic portraits of cities taken by Eugène Atget in Paris in the late 1800s. Tant street art transforms urban experience into viral images, destined for the Internet rather than a canvas. Francesco Barbieri does exactly the opposite. It tells the city so much cheerful, because it prefers an intimate vision of the urban landscape. It appreciates the chromatic rendering of atmospheres loaded with strong colors, in which the stylized profiles of industrial architectures reemergue. The letter and the word have no room in its production, but Francesco Barbieri's new lyricism makes the definition of visual poetry and remains the most suitable one to define the paintings and drawings exposed in the walls of Square 23. Paris , March 7, 2015 Christian Omodeo