Italian artists Fabio Petani and Paolo Psiko joined recently forces to create a wonderful mural for this year’s Quadricromie Festival in Camposanto, Italy.

Titled SULFATE, SPINUS TRISTIS & ORNITHOGALUM ARABICUM and created in Camposanto, a small comune located in Modena in northern Italy, the new mural is the result of a joined effort by Fabio and Paolo. According to Fabio, he studied the composition working around Paolo Psyko’s yellow birds. Not unlike the rest of his work, the new piece is also composed by other elements, such as plants and chemical elements, which in this particular case happens to be sulfate, a common chemical element from the region. The same elements, along with the birds are also characteristic of the American landscape and have in common the colour yellow. The blue shades are a expression of the sulfur that when it burns, creates a light blue flame. The colour palette certainly unifies the composition, giving shape to a great composition with smooth transitions, being also representative of both artists style and signature imagery.

Fabio Petani was born in Pinerolo in 1987. Throughout his rich artistic career, he has experimented, not only on the numerous commissioned murals, even on paper, canvas and alternative media. In this exhibition, some works on wood will be shown to the public for the first time, a material that enhances the subtle yet strong relationship between abstraction, nature, and chemistry that make him easily recognisable.

His murals express a fine balance between organic forms, geometry and lettering, always adding patches of earth colours into a composition characterised by a strong symbolism. He also makes use of delicate natural shapes and the symbology of natural elements such as chromium, platinum, americium and so on. Nothing seems to be random in Fabio Petani’s work. There is always some kind of connection between the depicted elements in his paintings and the composition, incorporating the numbers of the elements and even the colours when they apply. Each of these elements, chemical or part of the flora, is somehow connected to the environment or context they were created in.

Paolo Psiko, born in 1982 in Turin, Italy, is a painter and muralist, who lives and works in Ferrara, Italy  since 2008. In recent years Psiko’s work started mixing pixelled-art, glitching and splitting images becoming his signature.


Fabio Petani: website | facebook | instagram

Author: Fran

Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.