ANDY. "Pop forever and everywhere"

Behind Andy’s work, is immediatly clear, lays a craftsman ability, a proved experience as graphic designer, but there is also a vital energy which springs out of the surface of his paintings which is hardly found among ther young artists who associate in the vast territory of Pop iconography.  

Andy is not concerned about originality. As he writes in his biographical note his ideal is “creativity’s absolute zero to explore different contests to contaminate”. To contaminate for him means to fully assimilate (with hidden and pondered shrewdness) every image which interests him and that proceed from cinema, music, television, advertising, comics, fashion design but also from art history; his aim is to create paintings that plays with recognizable quotations and that surprise for their exaggerated and exuberant visual collage.

All these elements are elaborated, singled out, summarized, combined, juxtaposed and overlapped and finally united in a language whose primary aim is straight comprehensibility and visual enjoynment, but also retains a peculiar individual expression even if it appears as deliberately impersonal. 

His chosen stage- name is cleary a tribute to Pop art undisputed icon, Andy Warhol but to be honest Andy jr. is, as every one in his generation, very far from the critical problematicity and from the conceptual coldness and irony of the master of the 1960s. It is the more sparkling post modern age of 1980s the main reference and the almost historical starting point: it is the New York of Fashion Moda and of Fun Gallery, of writers and hip hop culture, ofrock and punk, of the intertwining creative practice between paintings, music, fashion, design and comics; this is the model that soon spread to Milano and to other Italian cities and its further developments which interest and involve Andy.

Andy is also a musician: he played sax and keyboards with Bluvertigo, he composes music for contemporary ballett and theatre and he enjoy himself as a dj mixing different kind of music.

As a painter he does more or less the same thing mixing images of his cultural world, using a technical proceeding made up of a clear and synthetic graphic transcription and fluo acrylic colours which illuminates and electrified his paintings almost as the works of his friend Marco Lodola with whom he has often collaborated. His works shares many elements with the Pop music idea of rythm (not only for the presence in many of these paintings of the most famous Pop stars portraits): more than being works to contemplate Andy’s paintings are stimuli for their cromatic aggressiveness and also thematic suggestions in which the artist mingles all his passions for music, comics, cinema and life style.

But the energy of his painting is not confined within the work itself. It is overflowing and it influences also the exterior reality involving every kind of objects and spaces, transforming them in a theoretically never ending process of Pop transformation of the world. Beside paintings Andy covers with kaleidoscopic decorations music instruments, chairs, sofa, wardrobe, tables, manikin, plaster cast, shoes, slotmachines. With this process even the most common and acknowledged objects become something fantastic.

When in an exhibition one see the paintings hanging from the walls and the gallery furnished with objects and decors, when one is immersed and influenced by this explosion of form and colours, that is when one finally acknowledges the specific quality of Andy’s hybrid, wavering, pervasive and vital art.