Verbo

Born in 1977, Mitja “Verbo” Bombardieri is a versatile artist whose interests range from painting to the electronic avant-garde. His particular abilities in all the visual arts led him to mature rapidly in the European graffiti-writing movement in which his work resulted in his being invited to work with the historic PDB crew and being asked to participate in international exhibitions. The main message of Bombardieri’s paintings is the “cerebration of style”, which is both automatically the emotional conduit for his contempory life and the shiny dream aesthetic that found its first expression in that generation which grew up under a televisual bombardment of cartoons and video games, and which finds its collocation between broadcast mass media communications and city streets. His study of his personal mode of communication has changed it over time into dynamic and plastic forms that take on the structure of armour that protects the soul of an innocent letter, just as a child does, writing in his spelling book: they are true external skeletons of biomechanical insects that fight daily to survive in the urban ecosystem, visually contaminating it. Through the actions of a writer, Verbo willingly celebrates the sense that these beings represent the ferment of a spontaneous subculture that spreads beyond the social superstructure, bringing to the surface new, fresh and unexpected aesthetic forms, just as bees bring pollen to flowers. In addition to using the painting techniques that are typical of graffiti culture, Verbo has introduced new visual rules thanks to his use of the computer, projectors and FLxER, a computer program that he has co-developed. He takes the electronic instruments out of the spaces in which he usually exhibits as a visual artist and on to the street where his “Video Raids” find a more congenial “back to the street” public where everything is spoken about without distinction and, turning on the luminous signals in the dark of the night, a location is transformed into an essential part of the visual performance We can therefore speak about the spreading of the Word, a non-random play on words and letters. This is the starting point for a “mass literacy project”, choosing to work with the art market and presenting a particular study of his calligraphy that certainly celebrates his style while at the same time marking the relationship between the writer and his social context, a fundamental symbiosis for the essence of this form of expression. It follows that the choice of working on printing plates, symbols of mass communications, represents not only crossing and committing to the urban context in order to be seen, but also to crossing the publicity appearance that is in perfect tune with the act of writing itself: the act and the context, or the style that celebrates the contemporary.