Inside Banksy

Banksy is one of the most famous and controversial artists of the contemporary scene. His strategy of willingly working in the shadows without disclosing his personal identity is a necessary and unbreakable condition to escape every sort of control: Banksy has built his fame on invisibility. Mostly known for his street art, Banksy has used different methods to develop his conception of art as a form of protest and disobedience to the system. The artist always integrates a seemingly incongruous and disorienting note among the subjects of his murals, paintings and prints, managing to capture and draw our attention and pushing us to take a closer look at what is in front of us in order to understand its meaning. What matters to Banksy is not the form, but the message.

“I love graffiti. I love this word. For me, graffiti is synonymous with wonder. In comparison, any other artistic genre is, without a doubt, a step back.”

Banksy comes from a strong punk antagonist and underground vocation, paired with anti-intellectual and sub–cultural connotations, referencing a world of “minor players” and “beautiful losers” (“the history is not made by great men”, sang the punk band Gang of Four). The movement gave life to some of the codes of visual protest that had an impact that we could define global. The visual legacy of punk is wide and its graphic codes symbolize fight and resistance, but also a complex subcultural visual dictionary for deeply anti-authoritarian consumers, of which Banksy is part of. “Like most people I have a fantasy that all the little powerless losers will gang up together. That all the vermin will get some good equipment and then the underground will go overground and tear the city apart”.