ARKE

My name is Stefano, I was born in Colombia and I have lived in Florence for 12 years. I attended the Art School in Porta Romana, Florence, and later graduated in Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence.

For me, it is necessary to constantly create through various languages of art; music, photography, crafts and painting. Of all these, my main research is through mural painting; I am known in the street art world as ARKE.

I have always created, drawn and experimented with lines and colours from a young age. I began to be interested in the world of hip hop when I was more or less 11 years old, I was attracted by the writing on the walls when I walked the streets of the city with my parents and so I began to discover the world of writing, drawing on paper or on the walls of my room. Bogota being a huge city (10,000,000 inhabitants and 1,636 km² of surface area) has always really offered a lot of stimuli and artistic diversity, which in some ways have been a key point for my continuous discovery.
My first year in Italy I attended the Sesto Fiorentino branch (a small town near Florence) of the Liceo Artistico Statale di Firenze (Florence State Art School) because there were no more places in the main branch in the centre of Florence. A year that was a bit of a standstill at an artistic level. The turning point came the following year, when I finally entered the Porta Romana seat. I had the chance to get to know many more people, some of whom shared a love of hip hop and a passion for graffiti. Through friendships and contexts, I got to know the Operatori di Strada del quartiere 4, a cooperative whose goal was to give new stimuli, support and opportunities to the neighbourhood kids. Up to this point, in my world, writing and the figurative world were on different islands, even though I was already painting my pieces on the walls with spray cans. One day the cooperative organised an event in the square on the islet, they set up 4m x 4m panels and made spray cans available for anyone who wanted to paint, and there was music and the B- Boys dancing a few metres away. I decided this time to do a landscape instead of a sign, but I had never used spray cans to do a figurative. I was amazed at what had come. This was the work that opened a door inside me and allowed me to approach cans and my artistic research in different ways.

I thought ”this is the way I have to go” and this spontaneous decision opened up the need and desire to discover my abilities with spray cans beyond graffiti. It was the work that materialised an image within me most clearly, the first figurative work I did with spray cans.

After that, life led me to participate in small events such as the one described above, to have the opportunity to constantly test myself, to find people and spaces with whom I could share my passion, to start integrating graffiti and figuration and to carry out research that was more open to public reading; I realised that this is probably one of the points that differentiates street art from graffiti. In a moment came my first commission, a mural inside a room. And then another and so slowly the wheel began to turn on its own. I lived in Barcelona one year on Erasmus, in my second year at the academy. Another important point that nourished my artistic career even more and gave rise to a project that later became my thesis: Storie Anonime, a series of photo-books on wall interventions in Barcelona and Florence (I am now finishing the third photo-book on Bologna and am in the process of publishing the entire project).

What I produce is often linked to symbolic worlds. For me, creating is a space of continuous personal research. Every material, every surface has a different potential that can express different things, so art is a dialogue between the creator and the material, between what is created and the public.

One of the most significant works in my career I created at the end of 2021 when the first major commission came from the City of Florence, a mural that was created as a tribute to 2 important politicians who gave a very positive change to Florence in the 1950s: Giorgio La Pira and Mario Fabiani. The mural was created in collaboration with Droste. An 8m x 5m façade and a 2 week job.

In 2022 I went to Bogotá and was commissioned to paint a mural by the association Somos Lxs Nietxs De Gaitàn (We are the grandchildren of Gaitan). A politician from the 1950s who was often in favour of citizens’ rights, he was assassinated for his political honesty and his death produced a great uprising on the part of the citizens: ‘el bogotazo’, the great demonstration of disagreement on the part of the population that destroyed the city and marked a net change in the history of Bogotá.
The mural was created in the centre of the big city, on a major boulevard.
A wall of more or less 20 m² by 5 m² and a construction time of 1 week.

At the end of 2022, I won the competition ”The future is green and digital” organised by the association Dietro la lavagna in Merate.

In the summer of 2023, I realised my first realism without any collaboration; a commission from a restaurant on the beach in Finale Ligure, a sea turtle. An area of 6 m² x 3 m². And a week’s work.

At the end of 2023, I made a mural for the club ‘The Green Shacks’, a mural that recalls the harmony of being together, the intervention renewed a space inhabited by children and families that was previously degraded and absent.