StenLex. Rinascita - Intervento artistico site specific e stendardo urbano

Created on the walls of the cloister-garden is the site-specific stencil poster intervention with the exciting title "Rinascita" (Rebirth), specially created for the Gallery in collaboration with Wunderkammern Gallery.

A mural series that stylistically compares with the external banner placed on the facade of the Piacentini Pavilion, adjacent to the GAM entrance. A sign of the contemporary in the historical city, again by StenLex, under the sign of 'rebirth'.

After all, rebirth, as renewal and regeneration, is one of the ideal themes pursued by StenLex, pioneers of the stencil poster, which has made them among the most internationally renowned Italian muralists.

The StenLex duo, who play on the ambiguity of unrecognisability, is made up of a Roman artist and a Taranto-born artist, class of '79-'80. Their names first appeared on Roman walls in 2001 with strong references to cinema, sacred art and pop culture, first separately, making portraits of characters from Italian b-movies and 1970s American TV films such as Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Bergman. Since 2005, their paths and names have merged, unleashing twice as much energy and creativity in their work. Moving from iconic faces on stamps and banknotes to drawings and posters on tissue paper, they arrive at the creation of what they call the Hole School, introducing mezzotint into stencils, optical figures composed of pixels or lines.

From 2010 to 2013, they create portraits of anonymous people on large facades, mostly students and professors taken from university yearbooks from the 1960s-1990s: this is the period where they move further away from Pop iconography to give space to unknown characters belonging to the middle class.

The constant experimentation, which is the hallmark of their art, soon led the two artists to the invention of the 'stencil poster', a stencil-based technique inspired by classical engravings and today's prints, designating them as 'engravers of the new millennium'. Stencil Poster consists of sticking a poster on a wall as if it were wallpaper, which is then painted over and finally letting the weather, taking the place of the artists, reveal the final work by destroying the paper matrix and allowing the painting underneath to emerge. This process goes against the main use of the stencil which is its reproducibility, the matrix decaying makes the work 'unique' and no longer replicable, a paradox of the technique.

Their style has been evolving in a surprising way since 2013, when the two artists turned from figurative art towards the composition of abstract shapes, lines and landscapes, being influenced by artists such as Kandinskij, Mirò, Dorazio, Twombly, Sol LeWitt, and Frank Stella, but never abandoning the street, the place where it all began.

Appreciated not only in Italy, in 2008 they were invited by Banksy to his Cans Festival in London and, increasingly in demand, in the following years they began working on huge surfaces, creating gigantic works for some of the most important festivals at international level, such as the Nuart Festival in Stavanger, Norway (2008, 2010), the Living Walls in Atlanta, USA (2012), the Katowice Street Art Festival in Poland (2013), the Palma festival in Caen, France (2019) and many others. In 2014, the Italian Cultural Institute supports them to create a façade in Shanghai, entitled 'Vulcano'.

In 2014, they realised 'Arazzo' at the Foro Italico in Rome. The same year, they participated in group exhibitions in contemporary art museums such as the Maco in Oaxaca, Mexico, the Caixa Cultural in São Paulo, Brazil, and the Cafa Museum in Beijing.

Among their latest projects is their participation in the exhibition 'Cross the Streets', at the MACRO in Rome in 2017.