20.11.2018 Vinyl mon amour: interview with omino71 and Electrovinyl for the exhibition Po(P)rtraits Show
Arianna Pasquale x RomeCentral
What is the idea that inspired this exhibition?Dario contacted me to verify the possibility of creating an exhibition event for the Elctrovinyl project, in line with my production and with the offer of the Vinyl Corner that had just begun. From the very first meeting we realized that it was possible to work together given the common passion for music and visual art, which are the distinctive elements of vinyl compared to other media for music reproduction. The idea that came to us was therefore to connect a disk to each exhibited work and thus compose an imaginative playlist for an exhibition event that from November 16th to December 15th will fill the “hall”, “mezzanine” and “cave” spaces of the Contemporary Cluster.
How did you choose the combination of records and artworks? To make the combinations between the works and the discs, I drew a real conceptual map in the narrative logic of the “ready fake”, starting from my name “omino71” to which I have long added the title of “nonstreetartista”, which is a quote / reworking of the “non-musician” of Brian Eno, intended as an artist technically lacking in skills but strong in his creative genius. The narrative came by itself, it was enough to put on the plate “Before and After Science”, read between the liner notes that “By This River” was composed together with Moebius and Roedelius, that is by the German duo of “Cluster”, the whose debut album was “Cluster71”, in short everything was already written … Following Eno’s career I found a thread between my works and some of the most iconic records of pop-rock culture, in a series of connections, coincidences and impossible narratives, where sometimes the connection is immediate, even declared, others more subtle, linked to the productive genesis of the works, in short, it is a state of a real journey that I invite you to redo with me, almost a treasure hunt from which perhaps we will discover that Andy Warhol was not only the star of pop art but also the initiator spirit of punk culture.
Art and music united by vinyl. What does vinyl mean to you?
I’ll tell you with an anecdote from childhood. On Sunday morning a collective ritual was celebrated at my house: we listened to the music all together. My father used to turn on his automatic record player which allowed him to listen in sequence to multiple vinyls stacked between them, in a sort of ante litteram playlist alternating a disc of his (from Adriano Celentano to Pink Floyd) and a record of ours, that is my and my brothers ( from the songs of the Zecchino d’Oro to the theme songs of the cartoons), so everyone sipped the taste of the other and learned something new. While listening we passed the covers, we looked at the figures, we read the texts of the inserts and maybe so, thanks to vinyl, as well as training the ear, I learned to read and above all to scribble by copying the cover drawings.
Why come to see the exhibition?
Why come to see the exhibition?
Because it offers an overview of my production, fifty works including canvases, mixed media, vinyl records, skateboards and art toys, including pieces of repertoire and unpublished works created ad hoc for this exhibition that is hosted in one of the most beautiful spaces of the capital.
Because the Vinyl Corner is full of beautiful records.
Because we have reserved a surprise in the “cave” space, that is in the Contemporary Cluster underground floor, but being a surprise I can’t tell you anything more.
Vinyl Yes or Not … Why?
Yes, yes! I admit I am a collector, I have all the 45s of the Smiths and all that was printed of the Cure, including the South American editions with the texts in Spanish, I inherited my father’s record collection and I never stopped feeding it, listening and buying new and used records, even when no one wanted them anymore, mocked by friends who trashed entire collections of records to go to the most comfortable CDs, up to disposable liquid music, which you listen to today and tomorrow have already forgotten. The reasons are many, I could decant the qualities of the recordings, from the warmth of the sound reproduced by the grooves, all of which are sacrosanct truths from a true audiophile, but then we end up talking about pins, arms, cymbals, hi-end systems and the essence is lost , that is the intrinsic value of vinyl as an object that contains different elements: the songs to be reproduced with the right care, the artwork on the cover and the inserts, the complete texts of the songs, the liner notes, in short, we are talking about true and own works of art.
What is your favorite piece in the show, and why?All the works exhibited are my “daughters”, so it is difficult to choose one among the others. But I can mention a few unpublished ones that have had a life of their own, even before becoming a work of omino71.
“MoroDerMaus” I made by painting on the cover of Giorgio Moroder’s 45 rpm I inherited from my father, so I consider it a tribute to those who introduced me to life, as well as a passion for music and art.
“Sad Smurfs” instead I created directly on an old Cure poster that I bought more than twenty years ago at a concert in Florence (where I often went to buy records from Contempo, a cult store for all vinylmaniaci) and which I kept hanging in all my houses, moving after moving, wearing it down so much that turning it into a work was the only way to preserve it and give it a new life.
What would you like to convey and leave with this initiative?Like any other exhibition, I leave a piece of myself, of my imagination and its three possible interpretations: the declared one, the intimate one and the one left to the free interpretation of the public, which is always different for everyone. In particular, as the title suggests, “Po (p) ratraits” is a collection of pop culture icons, created in my two typical ways: “super masks” versus “throw-up”: from Mickey Mouse to Andy Warhol passing through David Bowie, Bela Lugosi and Donald Trump, a series of previously unpublished and repertory portraits that for the occasion I combined with a selection of fundamental records, from “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by Stooges to “Killing in the name” by Rage Against The Machine “passing through” Planet Rock “by Afrika Bambaataa with the sampling of Kraftwerk … in other words” lots of stuff “.
Will we still find vinyl in your future projects?Surely there will be other opportunities to work with vinyl and vinyl and it would not even be great news, considering that I have always used it as a support for painting, a practice that I share with hundreds of artists from all over the world who in 2009 I gathered in the collective project “Vinyl Factory”, boasting numerous attempts at imitation, almost like the Enigmistica Week.
Because we have reserved a surprise in the “cave” space, that is in the Contemporary Cluster underground floor, but being a surprise I can’t tell you anything more.
Vinyl Yes or Not … Why?
Yes, yes! I admit I am a collector, I have all the 45s of the Smiths and all that was printed of the Cure, including the South American editions with the texts in Spanish, I inherited my father’s record collection and I never stopped feeding it, listening and buying new and used records, even when no one wanted them anymore, mocked by friends who trashed entire collections of records to go to the most comfortable CDs, up to disposable liquid music, which you listen to today and tomorrow have already forgotten. The reasons are many, I could decant the qualities of the recordings, from the warmth of the sound reproduced by the grooves, all of which are sacrosanct truths from a true audiophile, but then we end up talking about pins, arms, cymbals, hi-end systems and the essence is lost , that is the intrinsic value of vinyl as an object that contains different elements: the songs to be reproduced with the right care, the artwork on the cover and the inserts, the complete texts of the songs, the liner notes, in short, we are talking about true and own works of art.
What is your favorite piece in the show, and why?All the works exhibited are my “daughters”, so it is difficult to choose one among the others. But I can mention a few unpublished ones that have had a life of their own, even before becoming a work of omino71.
“MoroDerMaus” I made by painting on the cover of Giorgio Moroder’s 45 rpm I inherited from my father, so I consider it a tribute to those who introduced me to life, as well as a passion for music and art.
“Sad Smurfs” instead I created directly on an old Cure poster that I bought more than twenty years ago at a concert in Florence (where I often went to buy records from Contempo, a cult store for all vinylmaniaci) and which I kept hanging in all my houses, moving after moving, wearing it down so much that turning it into a work was the only way to preserve it and give it a new life.
What would you like to convey and leave with this initiative?Like any other exhibition, I leave a piece of myself, of my imagination and its three possible interpretations: the declared one, the intimate one and the one left to the free interpretation of the public, which is always different for everyone. In particular, as the title suggests, “Po (p) ratraits” is a collection of pop culture icons, created in my two typical ways: “super masks” versus “throw-up”: from Mickey Mouse to Andy Warhol passing through David Bowie, Bela Lugosi and Donald Trump, a series of previously unpublished and repertory portraits that for the occasion I combined with a selection of fundamental records, from “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by Stooges to “Killing in the name” by Rage Against The Machine “passing through” Planet Rock “by Afrika Bambaataa with the sampling of Kraftwerk … in other words” lots of stuff “.
Will we still find vinyl in your future projects?Surely there will be other opportunities to work with vinyl and vinyl and it would not even be great news, considering that I have always used it as a support for painting, a practice that I share with hundreds of artists from all over the world who in 2009 I gathered in the collective project “Vinyl Factory”, boasting numerous attempts at imitation, almost like the Enigmistica Week.