Blu Changes the Game

Graffiti-art has come a long way since its identity as solely a vandalistic act. Painting on walls used to carry certain stereotypes that have been challenged by the recent popularity of many contemporary street-artists, and specifically graffiti-artists, who are paid to paint on urban canvases around the world. One artist who is turning heads in this strange paradox of paid-vandals is a 30-year-old street-artist from Bologna, Italy who goes simply by Blu. He is changing the face of street-art as his primarily monocolor, and almost always politically charged, paintings have been popping up on walls around the world.

Blu is a great example of the widening acceptance of steet-art worldwide. Blu’s ability to paint walls all around the world comes, in large part, as result of his widening success – actually being paid to paint in exhibitions like this one at the Tate Museum of Modern Art in London.



Blu has also participated in many of the street-art festivals that have been popping up in cities all over Euroupe. Take for example the Fame Festival in Indirizzo, Italy which invites an international selection of
street-artists to paint on the walls of their city. This in-turn opens up opportunities for other street-artists for acceptable venues for their wall-based painting. Eventually popular artists like Blu start having books of their work or sketches sold, as well as prints of their pieces.

The size and quantity of Blu’s pieces are daunting. He travels far and wide as he paints his way around the world. As his blog reports, he has spent most of the last four months touring around South America, stopping in cities such as Buenos Aires; Argentina Lima, Peru; and Bagota, Columbia.

Some of his paintings are commissioned by private owners, some are done as a part of street-art festivals that have been popping up all over Europe, many of them are probably done illegally. These ‘rouge-paintings’ are in large part possible due to Blu’s growing fame. For example, many of the ‘art-projects’ and ‘exhibitions’ that contract him don’t actually have permission to paint the walls that they do. His fame has lead to easy collaboration with street-artists of different countries.
The full collection of his work is illusive. His website, blublu.org does provide a large number of pictures of walls he has painted in the last four to five years; many of his pieces, though, are lost in the sprawl of the web. The more you search the more you find.

The same rings true with regards to Blu’s identity. The artist’s use of a pseudonym probably has something to do with his easily identifiable style and the ‘guerilla’ nature of many of his works. Any biography you can find online is a visible farce. There is, though, one recorded interview with the artist done by Wooster Collective, an online magazine of street art and the dominion on all things graffiti. Here he names most of his influences as being street-artists that revolutionized the discipline; among them is Basnksy, a street-artist who paints small, highly political, stencil-based images all around the world.

The subjects in Blu’s paintings are mostly abstract beings, cartoonish human-figures, or large figures made of many smaller pieces; this is usually done with white, beige, or light blue paint inside small black outlines of the figure. His pieces almost always have a surrealist nature and he uses this surrealism to strike a very real chord. He often incorporates political messages into his images. Take for example this painting done in Bogotá, Columbia earlier this year commenting on the effect of U.S. Drug-trade with South America.



Blu is also changing the world of street-art by adapting the mediums used in the discipline. A huge part of Blu’s fame and success comes from his groundbreaking animated-graffiti. His first fully-produced video-upload to YouTube entitled “Muto” quickly accumulated one million views and is now at 6 million after one year of activity. His most recent animation, a collaboration with contemporary artist, David Ellis, entitled “Combo,” is ahead of pace – racking up almost three million views in under five months. This popularity acts as yet another resource in providing Blu the opportunity to paint more walls.

These amazing videos incorporate Blu’s style in an animated format done by stringing thousands of single photographs together in what is called stop motion animation. Similar humanesque-figures transform into strange and otherworldly images, grow, move and dance around courtyards and through city streets. The final product even includes sounds that bring the images to life. Blu’s pioneering of this new medium is truly revolutionizing the world of graffiti-art.

David Ellis comments on this new street-art, stop-motion phenomenon in a video interview with Vernissage TV. Ellis’ newest project includes a week-long live painting performance in the window of a store. All the while, pictures are being taken of him in high definition, the end product will be projected on a wall or screen during a gallery showing. This new medium combining painted art on walls with video-media creates new possibilities for artists allowing them the opportunity for collaboration with artists of different disciplines. “If you know other people who are talented in other things and you want to make it more fun, and enjoy it, then you have to make it for what you enjoy, and be around people, and collaborate,” Ellis said. This collaboration between artists seems to be part of an identity as a new type of artist being adopted by many street-artists, and being widely accepted as it turns out.

Even more so, Blu’s newfound fame in the cyber and art worlds support new interest, collaboration, and evolution in and of street art and art as a whole. It challenges this idea of painting on walls as being bad and brings in a whole new notion of what art is and what the possibilities are when it comes to a ‘career.’