Roadsworth

The definition of Street Art contains in itself different realities, but what I am always happy to find out are DIY urban interventions with different kinds of installations and performances, rather than the typical and most common street art made of stencils and graffiti.

I am usually not interested in the work of most of the street artists (but I do recognize some of them as great, like Shepard Fairy: we are all thankful not only for the Barak Obama “Hope”, but also for the tribute to Johnny Cash with the Walk The Line  movie cover), however, in this huge crowd, I’d like to mention a canadian street artist, Peter Gibson, known as Roadsworth.

What It’s noteworthy in his work is the playful game between stencils and the road marks, that goes straight to that level of interaction that performances and installations usually provide.

Image taken from http://roadsworth.com

What I see in his language is the willing to improve the limited language of city’s street by adding elements of visual information that transform boring signs into funny images, in order to catch people’s attention. Painting over city asphalt marks with his stencils, he gives the roads a new face to play with.

In his drawings, he prefers to use a subtile irony rather than the abundant violence we so often find in much of the works of street artists. As he explain in his website “In the spirit of Marcel Duchamps, all I had to do was paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa so to speak, to introduce a glitch in the matrix”.

In 2009, a movie about Roadsworth was realized, titled Crossing the Line. Making movies about street art, in these last years, looks like something fashion and I am worried it could be ephemeral (from Beautiful Loser to The Ephemeral Rebellion, from Bomb It to Exit Through The Gift Shop), but maybe we can give it a chance.