RE-EVOL-UTION

Out of town. text by Rocco Salomone.

If walking around London or Berlin you happen to see the miniature buildings located in the most unexpected place in the city, you know that you are in the presence of a work by Evol. A Berliner, an exponent of the vast and varied world of street art, he is an artist capable of creating a city within a city. The typical work by Evol is the transformation of banal and worn urban surfaces, such as planters and electrical boxes into architectural miniatures. Carefully designed stencil depicting repetitive patterns of grey walls dotted with windows that create small realistic buildings on which the artist plays by adding details such as satellite dishes, tags or graffiti.

His performances awaken feelings that are both ironic and sad at the same time, the colours used, brown, grey, black and white, highlight moments of humour, poetry and nostalgia and his streets, though uninhabited, don’t appear threatening, but transmit the empathy that the artist feels for the inhabitants of these unattractive and uncomfortable accomodations. One of his most unusual and objectively innovative creations is perhaps the installation carried out at MC Dockville Music Festival held last August near Hamburg. A special situation for street art in this work, perhaps for the first time, abandons its territory to take control of a rural landscape.

Finding himself in front of an enormous open space, Evol decided not to build or add anything but to dig, cut off the ground like a new spatialist creating, with his typical stencils, an underground city, at eye level height, in which the visitor, as a Kaiju, can stroll watching the tiny claustrophobic city; classic Plattenbau talk about the failed modernist experiments and architectural utopias never quite forgotten, as well as modern “Pentesilee Calviniane” where people find it hard to identify themselves with their environment. In this work urban development implodes, the liberation from the underground ruins takes place only through the ascent to the meadow, which has now become the roof garden of the buildings below. However, no discouragement can be seen but only love for the city. This is Evol_Love.