Sharing a Coke with Banksy Artwork

ARTPOPCLASSIC by Marco Battaglini With explosive juxtapositions, artist Marco Battaglini collides the principles of idealistic beauty, as epitomized in Renaissance painting, with the modern anarchic anti-consumerist ideology of graffiti, that espouses the transformative power of defacement. Enormous in scale, the details of the pastiche artworks purposefully expose the divide between these two stylistic trends to emphasize the superficiality of our modern culture and the collapse of the concept of art and culture as a linear progression. Marco’s “unique compositions” are energetic frames that may contain everything from ancient Greek pillars to Renaissance nudes to modern luxury brands and urban graffiti. They smoothly combine a respect for tradition with a tendency for rebellion. The beauty of classical order and form goes hand in hand with wild and independent self-expression. It is as though these dissimilar modes of creativity aren’t really foes, but friends – two sides of the one same coin. Neither of the two can be suppressed or neglected. Both must always be put on display, permitted and engaged with. “Almost everything that you see in my work already exists,” the artist explains further. “All I do is capture all these elements belonging to different times, places and cultures in one work with the aim of expanding the range of possibilities of the observers, to stimulate their imagination. I have concluded that IMAGINATION IS EVERYTHING, it is the vehicle that takes us where we want to be, it helps us create our reality and my art wants to be a way that can expand the imagination of the viewer, a tool for you to fly beyond the logical structures.”