Tvboy, stage name of Salvatore Benintende, is no longer as interested in satire and irony in his works as when he started. In recent years, he has focused more on documenting and the social message. He sees the reputation and popularity he has acquired as an opportunity to talk about transversal, relevant issues that affect society.
The Disseny Hub in Barcelona dedicates an exhibition to him that can be visited until September 11 and which brings together a total of 70 works under the title Tvboy. The invasion. The invasion to which the title alludes has its explanation in urban art itself, which is still an invasion of space. Paintings on canvas, installations and street art photos occupy different areas of the exterior and interior of the site and interact with the environment and architecture.
The visit is planned as a thematic tour through the works of this international reference of the genre, which deal with universal themes such as love, power, the heroes of our time and the history of art.
In the words of the curator of the exhibition, Nicolas Ballario: “Tvboy perfectly embodies our era, because it removes the borders between disciplines and leads us to abandon a categorized and sterile vision of the world”.
“What is a kiss?”, he asks in one of these spaces, where through kisses between iconic figures of pop culture – like the one he painted between Messi and Cristiano, which the artist popularized in Barcelona – he talks of love as the way to overcome rivalries. “A kiss can be a symbol of reconciliation, a gesture that establishes dialogue between opposing concepts at a time in history when dialogue seems impractical,” he explains.
The Italian artist dedicates part of the collection to the distortion and adaptation of the great classics of art from a current perspective, breaks the sacredness of the great works and merges with a new society in which immediacy reigns , in which, according to the author – and as he represents it in one of the works -, it would be most likely that Jesus took the apostles to McDonald’s in his last supper.
A year after the start of the war in Ukraine, he was invited by the oenagé Cesvi to make a trip to the country, where he was able to portray through 15 murals, with a story in each, the silent resistance of a people who he tries to keep his daily life alive.
Also in this line of more humanitarian art, he collaborated with Open Arms and created a mural inside the ship. “They told me: ‘Your mural will be the first thing those who have been about to die will see,’ so I wanted it to instill hope and joy.” The two projects changed the way of seeing the author’s art.
Tvboy’s favorite part is the collection of mural reproductions he’s been creating all over the world he’s been through. One of which is the figure of Saint Rosalia, patron saint of Palermo, his hometown. It is a representation, in a mural, of the religious icon, but with the face of the singer Rosalía. “Everyone worships her, Motomami is not that well known there and they don’t know who the singer is either, they think she is an image of the saint.”
