Milan, Italy

What happens to street art when it's taken off the streets?

A recent animation surfaced on the internet racking up a couple million views in the short month it's been up. Titled MUTO and signed by the Italian street artist Blu, the animation follows a series of evershifting tags as they move across the city. Done like an old style flip book, Blu painted every single image necessary to make the animation move on the wall, snapping each change on his camera. This time-consuming diligence resulted in a wild sequence of crazy, sinister figures mutating, dismembering, folding into one another moving across the walls of the city with sinister ease. Blu had already established his rep as a street artist, and after this internet hit, his fame has taken a substantial rise. In Milan, the spectrum of his pieces – mostly big ass illustration decorating facades - goes from the legendary squat Cox 18 to the PAC contemporary art museum.

With one of his huge pieces still drying on façade of the Tate Modern, some of Blu's sketches and videos will be exhibited in the street-art conscious Patricia Armocida gallery and three yet-to-be-specified locations will be painted with his characteristic illustrations. One of the street artist's creepy characters will make an appearance at Hangar Bicocca, a gallery for contemporary art on Milan's fringes.

Blu circles closer and closer to the art world, but taking street art off the streets can be like taking a fish out of the water; it dies.

Mission Report

After a lot of trouble, me and Daniela finally reached the car dealer in Turin, where we get our Mini Clubman, which led us through our mission in Milan, to find out about this interesting artist's work. As we got into Milan, pushed by our curiosity to see where BLU realized his works, we traveled to Lambrate station traffic. From afar we caught sight of his huge paintings, mostly yellow and with very particular features, repeated as if they were designed with a sort of matrix. But there are some smaller images, with different meanings: we observed and shot them. We think about the painting's meaning, and it's weird how precisely they're able to catch some of our modern social issues. Now it's sunset, and we have to stop our trip until the day after, which turned out to be sunny and beautiful. We jumped back into our Mini, to keep our BLU tour, going through Milan's suburban areas (and not), looking for murals like in a treasure hunt. Hangar Bicocca, PAC, Conchetta squat, where Daniela shot new images and interviews. And then again, we drove back toward Turin, as tired as we were proud of our job!
Alessia Maria Giulia Manunza, Daniela Audino