SKULLS AND FLOWERS Painting

"Several years ago I chose Peter Hide 311065 as my stage name (my real name is Franco Crugnola) deriving from the oxymoron between PETER PAN (the eternal good kid) and Mr HYDE (the brutal and dark side of Dr. Jekyll). The two names are both very well known, the former representing the good, innocence, purity and beauty, and the latter the evil, the cruelty and the brute strength. As in R. Stevenson novel, where the uneven struggle opposing Dr. Jekyll (good) and Mr Hyde (evil) puts at stake evocative issues like the metamorphosis and the double, the mirror and the look-alike, up to the striking of the more intimate chord, so in my work I try and recreate the evil that can prevail upon us through an easy going and lively image. I try and represent the opposites through our day-to- day life images, apparently in harmony, and to open a sort of imaginary door towards the danger of the overwhelming ephemeral in the mind of the viewer that wishes to read deeply into it. In the current society, where everything is measured by money, where it often feels that not only is the matter subdued, but also the intangible, the part that mostly defines the human being, namely the money, to me represents the danger of a vast cultural decay, and by contrast the decline caused by being without it. I don't mean to depict poverty, physical and psychological violence, the environmental decay, graphically or in a pictorian way, but I don't want to represent the beauty generated only by manipulating affluence, the almost divine feeling of power and the dream of happiness, either. What I want to do is make you ponder on what we bustle about and die for: money." Peter Hide 311065 was born in Varese (Italy) in 1965 and Degree in Architecture-Design in Politecnico University of Milan in 1994. He exhibited at the first Biennale of Malta in 1995 and won the second prize. Exhibits in Cumbria (GB) and in London in 2003, Varese in 2010, Berlin and Venice in 2011 and in the same year he exhibited at the "Galleria Orler" of San Martino di Castrozza. Even in Milan, Brescia and Gallarate in 2012, again with important personal and collective well-managed if it puts to "show" money and the malaise of our society in a humorous and irreverent, in all its meanings.