Alo Street Artist, East London and Italy

By Deanna Selene |

“I’ve always been drawn to those outside society. Myself, I feel I belong most to this side of mankind. I think the criteria people use to make this distinction is deeply wrong.”

“I paint in my room alone. That’s necessary for me. That’s why I prefer to stick my pictures out in the street and then leave. I don’t like to stay in an open place with people looking at you. And I don’t paint by commission.”

“I usually start without any ideas, maybe just a hint of what I’m going to make. The picture emerges in a way I didn’t think about.”

“It’s like I have a box, and inside it, there’s my world: made-up not only of art, but my ideas about society too, by my political ideas and everything about my life, my past, music, literature, everything. I just take pieces from each of those and mix in the painting.”

“It took me a year to develop this style. Before, it was always about characters, very different than this and more precise. In Italy I had a lot of shows but always featuring the old style. I’ve only been in London since last January so I’ve not shown this new style yet; but the feedback I’ve received over the web and out in the street has been really positive.”

“I’m entirely self-taught. Took a course in industrial design while living in Florence, but quit after one month.”

“If I think about the intentions of street art in general, I’d say it’s revolutionary. My aim is to bring something different to street art. Most of what I’ve been seeing in street art is pop-art, cartoons, stencil. That’s o.k, but I’ve found my own style.”

“First I stuck my pictures directly onto the outside of buildings, but people they steal it (in Shoreditch – east London some people steal a lot of street art). So I started to make posters, created by printing several single sheets and joining them. In this way I can play with sizes and I can use more than one time a single image. Moreover, I don’t have to worry about someone taking an original artwork meant for everyone to enjoy. These are much more replaceable.”

“When I started in Italy to make street art, I began more for protest reasons than artistic. These last twenty years have been a shame for Italy.”

“I made several copies of a poster which showed a girl, painted in the old style, holding up a board with the words, ‘Italia is dead.’ I pasted it on Milan, Rome and Perugia walls. I used to write on walls the sentence ‘Poor vs poor’ too. I think that in mankind’s history there’s always been a war between poors, and they cannot recognize the real problem, the real enemy to fight.”

“For example in Italy there’s a strong racism against poor immigrants who come there to find a job. Dirty Italian politicians tell people that they are criminals, and that they steal jobs from Italian people. So people think it’s true and a war is pitted against people who are poorer than the Italians. This has often happened in history.”

“If people understood that the real problem is the politicians, the corruption and the stealing of public money, they’d join with others with sharing this same problems, to fight the real enemy and to really change something. This machine of poor vs poor is everywhere, in a lot of sides of human society, the problem is just to recognize it.”

“I think art is an act that artist does for himself. But then people recognize themselves and their feelings in artists’ work, and so it becomes really important for a society.”

“I really don’t have a definition for art. I thought about it several times but I cannot answer. But I can recognize when it’s fake. I think art is generally not linked to the rational world, but to the irrational. So I recognize when something is good and original and when it’s not, but I cannot explain exactly why.”

“I’ve got a lot of masters in my life; I’ve kept in touch with them by following what they painted, did, wrote, thought. I think that visual art is actually influenced by all kinds of arts and ideas.”