MBAG art - Aeonium Zero

Opera: Aeonium Zero, is the first in a series of works created in recent years by MBAG inspired by Biophilia. Biophilia is a theory conceived by the biologist and entomologist Edward Wilson that holds that living in a natural environment brings humans great psychophysical benefits.
Humans have a biological attraction to nature, but you can’t always afford to spend time in nature, which is why their project brings plants indoors, making them an integral part of the furnishings and aiming to convey the frequency of the plant world.
The style is inspired by Pop Art, with the aim of transforming plants into stars, making them symbols of beauty like Marilyn Monroe.
Why is society now saturated with famous people, worldly images, and consumerist products, while there is never enough nature.
And that's why, as subjects of their paintings, they chose the imperfect geometries of nature, which seem motionless yet forever changing.
The technique involves partitioning the forms into patches, a bit like Andy Warhol's silkscreens, but with colors less pop, because here we are not talking about society but about nature.
The image is not a print; it is a hand-painted work, with brushstrokes and color details and textures.
The work is an original, and of great painterly value, a value that is heightened by the fact that it is the first in the subsequent series of works.


Biography

MBAG was born in 2013 from the artistic and life partnership of Margherita Bobini and Andrea Gritti, two young artists who graduated with honors in Painting from the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin.

Margherita and Andrea begin to paint together, creating works that convey the beauty of nature through animal and plant subjects, with the aim of helping people understand and respect every form of life.

Their art ranges from portraits with abstract and geometric backgrounds to varying subjects each time, aiming to capture the viewer's eye with the contrast of vivid colors, realistic subjects, and dynamic backgrounds, with an expressionist rendering that lacks a sense of drama but is ironic and captivating.

In addition to important mural works, they often collaborate with the Museum of Urban Art, aiming to grasp the meaning and the soul of places, engaging with the territories by painting urban furnishings such as the famous Artist Benches. Their works have been exhibited in Italy and China.

Their body of work includes several drawings and paintings on canvas featuring subjects drawn from the natural and plant world, often presented in rhythmic intermingling with the human figure, which have been described as “captivating and engaging, with a strong pop matrix.”

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What do critics say:
The latest generation seems to use painting as a conduit to establish, with the contemporary scene, a relationship of evocation, sublimating the real to draw from it its hidden moods, challenging photography and forcing it to adapt, pursuing it on its own ground. What today appears partially unprecedented and stimulating is the attitude of mixing with ease traces and visions that belong equally to the “high” culture and to the “low.” Slivers of history mingle with psychedelic and metropolitan visions, together with symbols from the traditional repertoire of pop art, as well as fashion, illustration, and comic books, creating a balanced miscellany that seems to revive the splendor of the best years of the Eighties, when the rediscovery of individuality and the search for an aesthetically satisfying style capable of contaminating the genres manifested. The relationship between “pure art” and “applied art,” in the course of the twentieth century often tilted in favor of the latter, ready to pluck linguistic innovations from the former to adapt them to mass culture, now seems positioned at a level of perfect balance, with the two domains taking on the function of communicating vessels.

After several perceptible positive signals over the course of the Zero years, it seems that this vocation for a 'total' art—found also in graphic forms that aim to forge their own language, far from fashion, with an original grammar and vocabulary, in order to communicate in a world already saturated with signs, in sustainable design, in Street Art, and in particular forms of metropolitan artistic craftsmanship—constitutes the most significant novelty of the last decade.

Margherita Bobini and Andrea Gritti, working under the name MBAG, are a young and cohesive artistic duo whose stylistic traits fit well with what is written in the introduction. I have been consistently following their work for several years, I have observed their evolution within the Albertina Academy, where I teach and which I currently lead. In the course of a few years they have come to the attention of the Turin art scene with a concise and incisive style, made of vivid and bright colors and of a knowledgeable compositional rhythm.

In addition to important Muralism works, often commissioned by the Museum of Urban Art, where they have proven able to grasp the sense and soul of places, engaging with the local contexts, Bobini and Gritti have developed an interesting series of canvas works. The subjects range from portraits, painted with a surprisingly expressionist approach that eschews drama but remains ironic and captivating, to representations of subjects drawn from the natural and vegetal world, often presented in a rhythmic blend with the human figure. This stems from the genuine passion they nurture for these worlds, a passion they pursue by tending to unusual animal species that are too often regarded as exotic.

The invitation to create the canvases for the Pomodori#The Power Of Tomatoes exhibition could only be extended to them, which the Museum of Urban Art imagined as a collateral event to Salone del Gusto Off. The MBAG have created captivating and engaging paintings, with a strong pop sensibility, where these fruits of the earth that have always accompanied our everyday food in countless ways are depicted in the foreground, towering over abstract backgrounds and in dialogue with actors from the animal world that gently settle on their surface, like companions along the journey of the natural universe.

Edoardo Di Mauro