Filippo Bernabei: from Street to Pop (through Kurt Cobain)
- Il Mio Salotto
- 30 giu 2022
- Tempo di lettura: 8 min
Aggiornamento: 1 lug 2022
Face to face with a painter from Faenza (Emilia Romagna, Italy) born in 1984, self-taught, a lover of music and comics, with several exhibitions under his belt from Rome to London.
Ilaria: Where did it all come from, how did Filippo Bernabei's work and art come about?
Filippo: From Nirvana: Kurt Cobain, people always imagine him as a musician and singer etc. NO, at least not only. Kurt made space pictures, technically not beautiful, but very sick. He wasn't in his right mind. Even one of their covers was designed by him, 'Incesticide'. Being my second love, because I live on music and art, and one of my first loves at the age of 12 was Nirvana, I said to myself: 'I'll never be able to sing or play like Cobain, but I can paint like him".
So I went and bought my first canvases and colours. So if someone asks me what artist it all came from, who I was influenced by...well a musician. I like this a lot, my first loves blended and it all came from there.
Ilaria: How long does it take you to finalize a canvas?
Filippo: I don't have a modus operandi. Many people ask me this question. It can take me two hours or two months. Simply because I take the blank canvas, I put it there, then depending on what I have in my hands, pencil, colours, I start layering stuff, and at a certain point you walk away from the canvas and it's finished, but you don't know how it happened. Do I know beforehand what I'm doing and how it's going to come out? Absolutely not. I haven't the faintest idea. I have a lot of fun this way because if you're a creative person your head is like the luggage conveyor belt at the airport. It's continuous. When it gives you, that you open and lay down a new canvas, you have to take a suitcase, and you use that, then they keep going, they never end. After the first suitcase, I have 100 more. At any moment I can pick one up and create. The talk of inspiration, putting myself there to paint if I'm inspired, doesn't work. If that were the case, then you are not a true creative, that you have to wait for the moment when maybe inspiration comes once a month or even less. It has to be continuous in my opinion, and create with what you have and what you catch.
Ilaria: I noticed that in your paintings, especially in the early ones, there was an egg, fried or sunny-side up, as a recurring figure. Now it is not present in your works, but do you think you will bring it back up again?
Filippo: Yes, because it is one of those things that I put in my paintings, I don't know why I put it in, I don't know what it means but I know that it means something, I don't know what exactly, but I know that it has a meaning somewhere, but I don't even care to give it to you at the end, I don't want to know.
Ilaria: A free interpretation of people then?
Filippo: Absolutely! One can see what one likes in it! ...and then anyway it reminds me a lot of POP imagery! Well, I come from there, from pop, from cartoons, from comics. I go back to that for many things.
Ilaria: So that recurring element that is always in your paintings is a cartoon? A character?
Filippo: so... I've set myself this unambitious idea of representing the entire world population before dying, in the sense that what you see in my paintings is simply all the people you can see in the street. It's the multitude of faces you see on the street, they all look the same, but in truth I'm very careful never to make one identical to the other. Maybe a millimetre or a little line I change it, always, in all of them, absolutely.
They are faces, they are simply faces. So if I want to represent 7 billion people, I have to paint 7 billion different faces, otherwise the concept is lost. Because I very much agree with Bukowski's line that says:
'the greatest show in the world is the people and you don't pay for a ticket'
I am capable of standing four hours in the street staring at people because I am interested, I get lost looking at people.
So it's simply all the people I see in the street, stylised to the max. Clearly the form comes from my early work although it has changed slightly now. Face and two eyes stylised to the max. So much so that one day, a lady asked me: "but why do you always paint ice cream?"
All around it is my whole visual imagery of colours.
"Blackest eye - Porcupine Tree". "Hell is where I shelter"
Ilaria: Is there a reason for choosing only those few colours?
Filippo: No! I've noticed that I go very short periods. Capable of lasting three days. In the sense that I am capable of doing 5 canvases of blue, purple or green and then change immediately. I honestly don't know why. In the past I only used purple and orange, but now I've thrown myself a lot into green, very acidic. They are still very pop colours, which hark back to that imagery.
Ilaria: There are other elements, which I often see like these recurring circles, spirals. It depends on the paintings, but there are always these circular figures.
Filippo: I would like to say that it's all my own work, but no. I explained it this way: I have always liked Mirò very much. And there is this painting, the Blue Triptych by Joan Miró, which are practically three completely blue paintings next to each other, enormous, with only red circles following each other like mine, and I think they come from there. One day they started appearing in my paintings, I was wondering why I was doing these circles. This is how I work. First I do things, then I wonder where they come from. That's how it works in my head.
Spirals, on the other hand, is a childhood influence. As a child I was very fond of LucasArts video games like Monkey Island. LucasArts was a production company specialising in these video games, with worlds and sagas. It had developed these graphics in all its video games, which were very reminiscent of Tim Burton (Corpse Bride, Nightmare before Christmas) so if you add my adoration for these video games, Tim Burton, pop, the result could only be this. It's a sum of all the influences that you then rework as you grow and then you personalise it, you make it your own. You don't run away from influences. You can try all you want but you don't run away! You can come up with something personal but sooner or later, what has influenced you in life comes back out. So here it is, in my paintings it's like 37 years of my life, layered and condensed that I have chewed up and thrown back out.
"Tales from the Red Zone Vol. II" . "Just in time to wait another bit"
Ilaria: Tell me more about this painting.
Filippo: It has an almost symbolic value. It's the first work I did when the lockdown started, ever. Before that I had almost stopped for two years. I didn't touch brushes for two years. I was discouraged, disappointed, stuck. Nothing was coming to me. Then for some reason, when we went into lockdown, I asked myself, "what can I do locked up?" - Clearly I went back to painting. I didn't have any more confidence, I was convinced that I would throw the canvas away, that it was gone anyway, and instead out of nowhere it exploded all of a sudden, in two, three hours at the most she came out, this canvas. I looked at it and said to myself, 'here we go again'.
Mama self-esteem is back in a big way and you can only be happy about that.
Ilaria: Now tell me about this painting. Why there are no colours, no circles and all the recurring figures you usually use?
Filippo: Basically, these faces are nothing but the multitude of people you see in the street. This painting was supposed to be the summa of this concept but taken to the basic, removing colours, removing anything, just this concept, so just faces, just black and white, one different from the other because clearly as I said before, no two are identical. I was very disappointed that nobody considered that. Probably because of the absence of colour. To me, it penalises the use of such strong, bold colours that I like so much and it was absolutely lost. The concept was not considered by anyone, there were no colours, so they thought it was a little drawing like that, a little insignificant, but no, it was the sum of all that, but it didn't work. I'm very attached to it, though.
It also has to be said, that without color, or anything, it is perhaps reminiscent of the works of Mr. Doodle, the English artist who draws 'doodles' with a continuous line, one after the other, often without coloring them in: in his drawings, there are almost no gaps, every space needs filling. Perhaps it leads back to something like this, but for me, it is important because the concept behind it is what all the faces and all the recurring elements came from.
This other one, on the other hand, which is very similar but has a few more splashes of colour, circles and elements, attracted more interest.
This makes me think that often the interest in your work is really more about aesthetics than the concept or reasoning you can put behind it. Unfortunately, however, art is aesthetic, and you can do very little about it.
Ilaria: What materials do you use the most?
Filippo: Acrylic, enamel, never oil, I don't like it. Pencil to draw first and also the very ordinary Uniposca because being water-based markers, it is very easy to shade even with your fingers, they are very versatile. I only use stuff that is diluted in water, not synthetic stuff that needs white spirit. For two reasons: on the one hand for ease of use, on the other hand for the creative project itself. For the effects I want to achieve, these materials are fine.
Filippo: Can you see this little person here? I painted it in 2007. But do you know when I finished this canvas? The last months of last year. This canvas has 15 years of gestation. You see, when people ask me how long it takes me to do a canvas...
Ilaria: From two hours to 15 years...
Filippo: oh yes, this one really took me 15 years to finish. I remember that this canvas stayed there in a corner, completely with a black background, I didn't do anything with it...
There was just the little white man with this black background, then it always stayed there, for 15 years.
Ilaria: And what does that mean? Is this always the recurring face? This other one instead looks like a sad and dejected person
Filippo: He has the long nose of Pinocchio, mmmh...he must be a liar. And above a crown of thorns or a halo probably. I am not the least bit Catholic or a believer but I have an aunt who is a nun, and I have a heritage. The Christian tradition has always been there and in some way it must have influenced me because I put haloes, crowns of thorns, crosses everywhere, and it can only come from the Christian tradition. For the rest I don't know, when I find a good psychoanalyst I will be able to tell you what they mean.
Ilaria: It was an immense pleasure to meet Filippo, it was a fun, enlightening and introspective chat and he allowed me to enter his world. You can follow him on his Instagram profile @too.many.faces_art and you can find below his website where you can buy his works: https://www.saatchiart.com/filobernabei
