Lello Ardizzone alias Tony Wetfloor

Italia • Italy

Wetfloor’s works communicate great culture and tradition, skilfully expressed in a contemporary and technological key; but very little is known about the man himself. We know he is English, born around 1960 (we found his photo as a child on the social networks), but nothing more, only that he likes to travel for work and pleasure. Some say he does not even have a permanent address, but just a suite booked in the most fashionable hotels in capital cities, of course under a pseudonym.

Although they are heterogeneous, his works are immediately recognisable for the strength and culture that they emanate. Tibetan mandala from Vedic culture almost tattooed on the canvas, little mythological figures of warriors drowned in an interweave of colours that immediately point to street art and to a diametrically opposite culture.

Canvases that are rarely poor in colour, apart from some fine black and white work in the style of Vedova, or shaded navy blues rich in light in the style of Sturla. More often, the colours are mixed. The first works present pale shaded Pantones, rigorous brush-strokes like those of the great Dorazio.

Canvases scattered with coloured spots, with larger black ones here and there, as though for a moment your Ipad had lost its power or its connection; mosaics laid tile by tile on the tablet, with great technical precision and the knowledge of ancient and more contemporary symbolism.

Twenty-first century Persian rugs, woven and knotted by hand on the Ipad; every single detail is made, without “copy and paste”. Because nothing is “trivially” borrowed and copied from art history. Before becoming a canvas, each file is the result of graphic and mental reworking, cultures that are blended skilfully and first-person experience. But also of the emotions of the moment.

His most interesting pieces are produced in airport lounges or waiting areas, between one trip and another. And in fact the intensity of the colour changes, as well as the violence with which he throws the images down on the video of his Ipad. A tablet used like an old notebook or like a large- format canvas. A tablet without an Internet connection, because Wetfloor does not want to be traced and distracted by the social networks... perhaps because that PC from which something is extrapolated by his Art is like a sheet of paper, a blank canvas. The canvas where you must not copy, but reinterpret... What is not Art?

Serena Mormino, Curator