Neve and Peeta will inaugurate the show Drops of Light in the Galo Art Gallery on the 13th of June. These two artists have one thing in common and that is their attention to absolute detail.
Neve has prepared a show with exclusive works for the Galo Art Gallery with his recognizable hyper realistic human subjects. Peeta will bring a selection of exclusive works that focus on the study of drops. He will also bring a series of works on canvas of his more classic stylized 3D lettering.
Peeta, also known as Manuel Di Rita, is a graffiti artist since 1993 currently living in Venice. He is a member of the EAD crew (Padova, Italy), FX and RWK crews (New York City) and has participated in graffiti jams and Meeting of Styles events in Europe and the Americas. His work explores the potential of sculptural lettering, both in painting and in sculpture.
"In my work, I endeavour to realize the sculptural quality of individual letters, namely the ones that spell out my own moniker Peeta. I break them from their generic typographical form, stylizing them with shape and volume beyond its mere semantic function. Thus my own lettering is brought into the fluidity of the urban, where words are continuously ruptured from their own histories, readapted into idiom and gestures learned off the street. The final result derived from the fusion between traditional lettering and three dimensional style has given life to a unique kind of visual rhythm, created by the intersecting lines between sections of conic, cylindrical and twisting surfaces. The role of sculpture comes to be essential for this purpose. It represents for me a direct contact with three-dimensionality in order to understand the rules of light and shadows and to reproduce them.
Despite the depth of research into technical and formal perfection, the materialness of three-dimensional painting hides a deeply spiritual side. Shades of colour and perceptive tricks are essentially the means to a progressive disclosure of my own personality. They are an implicit intermediary of a precise message — of my will to understand myself and subsequently to describe my ego. The choice to represent and reiterate my own name is already an attempt to paint a self-portrait. My works are aimed at revealing the deceptiveness of human perception, the fallacy of narrow and fixed points of view through visual tricks which, proceeding from the attempt to confer a three-dimensional semblance on a pictorial representation, ultimately reveal their will to deceive."
Neve starts painting by spraying the walls in the streets of Turin in 1995. Neve’s passion for art grows faster between the street and life: with dark circles around the eyes and paint stained fingers, he never misses the opportunity to leave his mark in order to paint and to search for his personal style and refine his techniques.
Love for aesthetics and for classicism move him to combine urban art with academia thanks to the figurative art as a mean of expression. He paints in Italy, Spain, France, England, Greece, Switzerland and Germany, experimenting different types of artistic languages and techniques.
Driven by the leit motif that bursts into his drawings he directs his artistic interest in 2006 into realizing artistic performances and installations, many edited by Marco Scotini and Marcello Maloberti. In his works Neve insists on the value of his message for conversing with the observers and for leaving them an open question or at least a reflective mood. This is why in 2008 Neve produces urban works containing a strong social denunciation, like the silent protest of the Myanmar’s monk and the reversal of the roles of “Michelangelo’s Pietà”, which are showed at “Scala Mercalli”, curated by Gianluca Marziani in the Rome Auditorium. In the autumn of the same year he dedicates himself to a project of urban installations, disseminating Milan with fake bombs and cardboard weapons of war. This focuses the media attention on his work and is invited to a special program by TG1 and is also republished in many countrywide publications. The emotional impact of his work comes to the fore also in his bi-personal exhibition at the Milanese Magnorocca Gallery, which also exhibited him at the Mi Art 2008.
From graffiti to street art, from performances to classical academicism, Neve enhances its expressiveness with neomuralism. In his murals intervention with a hyper-realism of titanic dimensions come to life human subjects, suspended in a context sometimes fairy and sometimes real. In 2010 he participates to the Walls of Fame Project in Milan and during his career many Brands and Corporations, such as Campari, Fabiani, ENI Syndial.
Numerous canvases where he marries the internal life with the world surrounding him in a delicate expression of figurative art; also numerous are the collective exhibitions and shows to whom he participates, to mention one, the 3rd edition of (con)Temporary Art in Milan in 2011 and the Düsseldorf Exhibition where his work was near the work of Giorgio Di Chirico and last but not least the Venice Biennale, in the Italian Pavilion curated by the art critic Vittorio Sgarbi.
In the last years Neve focuses his search for style in drawings and murals interventions, characterized for a black background where he paints only the “light”.
From 2012 to 2015 his paintings are showed in Europe: Strasbourg, Paris, Moscow and London, in the same space in which Andy Warhol exhibited. These works of a refined visionary hide in the plots an almost figurative enigmatic message that evokes the Archetypes of the human condition, with an attention for details and a sensitivity that deeply touches the observer.