Mario Airò, THE MOTORCYCLE BOY REIGNS

Room 20

How is it that a fifty-year-old ‘madman’ starts graffitiing at Casa Testori? Why is he presenting us with a work from the last millennium?
The exhibition here would like to open up to the younger generations, to highlight their work. What does this graffiti suggest to us, which is not really graffiti at all, given that it is a quotation of a graffiti, moreover “cinematographic”, and therefore fictitious in origin… A quotation of a quotation therefore… And yet in every passage indexed… F.F. Coppola quotes with that graffiti, the character’s sign, the being against par excellence, and in the film he decrees its end, or crisis, and as its only existential development he posits a poetic act, destined to result in death. Beyond F.F. Coppola’s tragic vision, The Motorcycle Boy is an insane, anarchic figure, and thanks to his impossibility of adaptation, due to his “sensitivity”, the only one still capable of communicating us a truth, beyond any mediation.
From these observations, 15 years ago the desire to quote him was born, and now in this context, aimed precisely at the new generation and in the deep darkness of the new era, I hope it can say what it is and what I hope art always wants to be, and that is to say invention for a possible world, perhaps better than this one, where, as in the Motorcycle Boy’s dream, the fighting fish in the ocean can live in peace, because they each have enough space for their own needs.
Mario Airò

Each of his [Airò’s] works discreetly affirms that there is a possibility of seeing the world with new eyes, of living one’s own experience by cultivating an expectation of the world.
Gianni Romano

Mario Airò was born in Pavia in 1961. He lives and works in Genoa.