Orticanoodles

Bio

Active in the urban art scene since the early two-thousands, Orticanoodles has a portfolio of large-scale public art paintings in Italy and abroad, as well as being continuously involved in museum and gallery exhibitions and projects.

Orticanoodles was created as a stencil art collective and has continued to develop its artistic process by refining both stencil production techniques and the application of colour, which varies from spray to brush. The relationship between the work of art and the public space in which it is located plays a fundamental role in their creative process.

Their approach to street art, despite its volatility, is planned and designed down to the smallest detail, which has led to the commission of over 300 works of urban art in Italy and around the world.

Orticanoodles carries out projects of “participatory” urban art with results of the highest quality. This is thanks to the use of the spolvero (dusting) technique, used on Renaissance fresco paintings, to trace the preliminary design of the artwork onto a large surface area, which even non-experts can then paint, thanks to the clear subdivision of the various fields of colour that make up the image.

The collective has dozens of collaborations with for-profit and non-profit clients included among its credits.

The OrMe project, dedicated to the Ortica district, has established itself in Milan as a benchmark for mural art in the city, as well as distinguishing itself as irrefutable proof of the ability of urban art to generate positive synergy between art, paths of social inclusion and the improvement of urban areas that have been excluded from redevelopment programmes.

Orticanoodles’ innovativeness lies not only in the quality of its drawings or the social themes it depicts. In addition to being an urban art brand, Orticanoodles is also a curatorial and production factory for artists from other cities, which the collective invites to paint in Milan: Orticanoodles sees itself as part of a network filled with other, fellow artists, following a philosophy that is dedicated to inclusion and the strength of pluralist thought, and which is wholly removed from the concept of exclusivity and the individualistic perspective.

Calcata 2023 “FLY – State of Equilibrium”

Location of piece: Clock Tower – Piazza Risorgimento – Calcata (VT)

Description:

The selection of the location for the piece was dictated by a desire to regenerate and bring renewed value to a building with a strong impact on the square – the agora – so that it could become not only a point of social interest for the local community, but also a point of historical and cultural interest.

The clock tower is understood as an element that dictates time to the local community from above.

The project examines the ability of the plant world to fly. The blue background represents the sky, which provides a striking contrast to the leaves of the maple tree, a plant that is widespread throughout the world and a symbol of both the West and the East. The leaves appear to be falling from the top to bottom, just as they would when falling from the branches of a tree, but they are depicted upside down, which creates the first example of the inversion of the normal sense of orientation and movement.

The ability to fly, attributed only to birds, is subverted in the project by close-up images of maple seeds. Thanks to their characteristic “wing” shape, these seeds can reach areas that are extremely far away from the plant that released them.

The project aims to use the metaphor of nature to undermine the normal laws that govern the universe to do something magical, like flying – if a plant can do it, then why can’t mankind do it, too?

The project also wants to draw attention to the inseparable relationship between the equilibrium found in the body and the environment. This project experiments with new forms and visual solutions, including natural subjects that have been a constant in the collective’s artistic journey, perhaps unsurprisingly, given their name. Thus, in this piece, elements that are immediately recognisable and entirely new coexist at one and the same time, uniting a feeling of momentum towards the future and the most urgent issues of the present; it is no coincidence, then, that the word “fly” appears around the clock.

Technique and materials:

From a technical point of view, Orticanoodles are a cross between contemporary writers and Renaissance painters. The technique employed is known as “spolvero” (dusting), which is derived from the ancient tradition of fresco painting, involving coloured power being applied to the stencil to trace the outline of the artwork across the enormous surface areas involved. “The rest of the piece is then filled in using rollers, brushes and paints of the latest generation”.

Colour scheme:

The colour scheme selected for the piece intentionally reflects the colours present in the coat of arms of the Municipality of Calcata, which have been reinterpreted and made more harmonious with the surrounding context.