POP PASTA STICKER PROJECT

Pop Pasta Collaborates with 5 Renowned Artists for the First Edition of the Pop Pasta Sticker Project.

Pop culture and how it relates to street food and art are a strong influence behind Pop Pasta® and its founder, Luigi Fiorentino. The Spaghetti Donut® was the culmination of a creative process for Luigi, who uses the kitchen like a lab, a place to experience the creative process and to explore the intersection of food and art. This same creative process inspires a new initiative: The Pop Pasta Sticker Project.

The Spaghetti Donut® bridges two foods with a strong cultural heritage—the Neapolitan spaghetti pie and the American donut. In Italy, spaghetti pie is a product of the urban culture. It’s made from pasta leftovers and enjoyed as a portable treat. Similarly, the donut is an iconic American favorite, though usually purchased rather than homemade. Luigi bridged the two concepts in his novel creation of the Spaghetti Donut® in 2014.

“I like the idea to launch a project that reflects the same process that was behind the creation of the Spaghetti Donut®, the place where different disciplines and experiences related to the street food and the street culture, in general, can gather together and interact. I don’t want to keep our concept in the boundaries of the street food or fast food, and I would like to expand beyond the limits, enhancing new forms of collaboration between food and art,” explains Luigi. 

This philosophy inspires an opportunity to ask other artists to use the visual concept behind the Spaghetti Donut logo for their own artistic interpretation. The medium is the sticker, a new form of art expression that is a fresh visual voice, appealing and ubiquitous. Stickers artistically express pop culture, much as the Spaghetti Donut® is an artistic form of popular street food. The artists replace the logo, using the void for their own creativity.

The Pop Pasta Sticker Project will produce a collection of stickers over a number of years. The artists will be invited worldwide with particular attention to the two founding cities, New York and Naples. They may represent different arts, i.e., artists, designers, graphic designers, fashion designers, musicians, singers, architects and others. 

For the inaugural 2021 edition, the participating artists are furthering the connection between culture, art and street food. Ghost, Giz and Sipros, artists collaborating with the Bushwick Collective in Brooklyn, Lello Esposito from Napoli and Flycat Y-1 from Milano joined the Pop Pasta Sticker Project for the inaugural year. Their artwork will be produced in a limited quantity of stickers available at special Pop Pasta events.

GHOST

GHOST aka “Cousin Frank”, is one of the last kings of the New York City train writing era. The veteran graffiti writer, who got his start in the influential and well-documented New York City scene in the 1970s experimented with traditional letter styles until developing his own loose, funky and psychedelic letters. When most writers saw a train yard as an opportunity to paint a nice colorful piece, Ghost saw the yard as a place to bomb, to do hundreds of throw ups. He approaches his paintings with the same zest and casual grace as he does his throw-ups, with bold dripping explosions of vibrant colors and freaky cartoons. With frequent trips to Europe his style has inspired the new wave of Scandinavian-loose-bombing-style pieces. Today, he exhibits his artwork in galleries worldwide and does collaborations with urban culture brands.

GIZ

GIZ is a U.S. based graffiti artist that was born and raised in NYC. He began his graffiti career in the New York City area in 1988 at the age of 10. In the early 90’s, he primarily focused on “bombing” clean NYC subway trains. In 1991, GIZ started his appropriately titled street- bombing campaign, ‘MTA,’ (Most Talked About), throughout the 5 boroughs of NYC alongside members of his crew. 

In 1998 GIZ entered the gallery scene. GIZ started painting on canvases. In the late 90’s to early 2000’s, GIZ did multiple gallery shows throughout NYC. This was followed by several shows throughout Europe.In addition to several European newspapers and programs, his work has been featured in many television series, books, and magazines.

SIPROS

SIPROS Naberezny is a street artist fro São Paulo, Brazil. He started in the graffiti world in 1997. He specializes in photorealistic yet stylized portraits. He started in graffiti in 1997 and was known for his character “Big Ears”, which makes children’s analogy that is his source of inspiration and reflection. Self-taught, he ventured into the technique of realism in 2009 reproducing the faces of famous and anonymous. Sipros has participated in collective exhibitions and important graffiti gatherings in Brazil and in other countries such as the United States, Mexico, Bahamas, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Italy, Germany, Holland and China. His art is not only on walls, but in magazines, commercial projects, workshops, clothing brands, television and business franchises.

FLYCAT Y-1

Italian artist - writer, already from the age of thirteen representative of the first generation of Writing and Hip Hop Culture in Italy, proponent of a peculiar research on the letter that sees him confronting the wealth of knowledge coming from the American training scenario, of which he makes the most - as well as original - interpreter and spokesperson.

Protagonist in Italy of many exhibitions and events, not least his solo show in January 2020 "FLYCAT: The Piece (Peace) Maker" curated by Francesca Alfano Miglietti at MyOwnGallery / Superstudio Milano; FLYCAT's art is exhibited several times internationally and some of his works are included in the permanent collection on Urban Writing in the Mediterranean at the MUCEM French National Museum in Marseille.

The Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia Treccani inserts FLYCAT as an Italian historical artist-writer and original interpreter of the art of Writing.

FLYCAT has been able to raise its pictorial knowledge becoming a real point of reference for many young people who approach the artistic current of Urban Art.

LELLO ESPOSITO

Sculptor and painter, Lello Esposito focuses his research on the relation between contemporary art and tradition, by conceiving and re-elaborating the symbols of Neapolitan culture: Pulcinella, the mask, the egg, the skull, the volcano, San Gennaro and the horn, at various stages of metamorphosis.

Internationally renowned for his work on archetypes, symbols and cultural imagination of the City of Naples, Lello Esposito likes to define himself as a “cult artist”, referring to his personal research and experimentation which, over his long career, led him to significantly contribute to the creation of new interpretative and representative forms of traditional Neapolitan icons.

The artist’s studio is located at Palazzo Sansevero, in what once was Raimondo di Sangro’s workshop, while the atelier is located in the old stables of the same historical building.

Lello Esposito’s works have been exhibited in a number of personal and collective exhibitions, in Italy and abroad, and his works are part of national and international, private and public collections.

Summarizing the initiative, Luigi says “In my vision, the kitchen is the place where elements are combined in order to create food for consumption to feed the body and the mind.”