In the urban art scene that established itself in Europe starting from the second half of the 2000s, Italy today occupies a prominent place thanks to the experiences of some artists who, despite coming from graffiti writing (i.e. from the practice of tagging derived from New York) have made the abstract languages ​​already experimented between the 1950s and 1980s, in particular that of the spatialists and Gruppo Forma 1, Gruppo N and Gruppo T, re-proposing them in new forms and, above all, in the heterogeneous landscape of the city.

In this panorama, the trajectory made by Moneyless (Teo Pirisi, 1980) in the last ten years, and summarized here in a retrospective path enriched with new works, is configured as an investigation into geometry and its interaction with space – from that urban to natural, from the “flat” one of the picture (be it on canvas, wood or paper) to the three-dimensional one of sculpture.

Thesis and hypothesis is the title that the artist wanted for this exhibition. One thesis. Geometry, we said, as a point of contact and reconciliation between human creativity and nature, the latter symbolically brought back to the essentiality of the line – straight, open, infinite – and of the circle – curved, closed, finite. Many hypotheses, often conflicting. First of all, symmetry and asymmetry. The perfection of the circle and its explosion or fragmentation.

The essential and ideal refinement of the line and its thickening – hence its transformation into shape and the consequent and inevitable disappearance. Finally, the movement, expressed by circles that chase each other frantically on the plane, or by the overlapping of thickened and colored lines, according to a skilful play of transparencies which, analogically, simulates the progress by levels typical of digital graphics – which the artist has studied but promptly set aside to devote himself to drawing, painting and sculpture and never having to give up that involvement, ancient and corporeal, with the material to be molded.

This incessant search for infinite variations on the essential languages ​​of line and circle seems to have never abandoned Moneyless, in any of his experiments with matter: from the wood of the first tables marked by symmetrical compositions of circles, to the ethereal installations of wires in wooded situations , or even to the sculptures in which pieces of “broken” circles are combined and welded, then suspended and illuminated in order to project the random and kinetic play of one’s shadow onto the wall. In the artist’s latest production the shapeless seems to have almost taken over the geometric rigor that characterized his early works, and which seems to have gradually become rarefied.

Almost, however, because in the works on shaped and enamelled wood presented in the exhibition – hybrids, on the borderline between sculpture and painting – it is evident that the informal has not completely emancipated itself from the paternity of the circle and the line. This will probably never happen, but the results will always be different: this is the method that Moneyless seems to employ in his artistic research, and which benefits from his particular aptitude for traveling and exploring new natural and urban landscapes.

After all, the trajectory we want to tell has its true origin several years before 2008, and precisely in a journey. This journey leads from his hometown and trains to woods and countryside, from the metropolitan landscape of Milan to the more intimate one of Lucca, where a Teo Pirisi just fifteen years old and with a passion for graffiti writing had to move for family reasons.

Already at the time, the need to adapt an early creative genius from urban to rural reality quickly turned into an opportunity. Since then Teo / Moneyless has never stopped adapting – in contrast in an urban environment, in harmony in a natural environment – its material and aesthetic researches to the different contexts of its explorations.