From October 26 to November 16, 2018, Ephemeral Beauty, Mr. Wany’s tribute exhibition about hip hop culture and style writing, a tribute to those who exported the New York subway movement around the world, was hosted in via Palazzuolo.

The work chosen as the exhibition’s poster represents a butterfly with wings covered by the historical lettering with which the masters of New York writing, the pioneers of the style, have papered the city’s subways. The butterfly is selected as an expression of research that reflects on the transience of urban art: the animal is in flight, free and beautiful, but destined to live only three days, therefore ephemeral and elusive. In fact, the works found in the street live only in the moment of their realization, to be abandoned immediately afterwards to their fate, to what the street holds in store for them.

The photos published in the books ‘Subway Art’ and ‘Spray Can Art’ by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant are the first sources of inspiration, as well as the first films: Wild Style, Beat Street, and the documentary Style Wars.

In the project Ephemeral Beauty, the butterfly represents transformation and rebirth, but also fragility. Like the path that leads the caterpillar to become a butterfly, it represents the evolutionary path of our soul, it is the symbol of the transformation that leads everything towards something better, something magical. The symbolic meaning of the butterfly derives from the transformation that this creature carries out during its short life cycle; a being that can move only by crawling suddenly transforms, unleashing beautiful wings with which it can fly away to become unreachable.

ALTRO