We interviewed Cripe, the first artist to be part of the collaboration with BAO “Tutta la gustosità di oggi”.
Between past and present, what triggers his passion, his inspiration and the difficulties he encounters.
BAO: How would you define your art? What do you want to communicate and convey?
Cripe: My art is totally introspective, it is the materialisation of the states of my spirit.
The aim is to represent what my being perceives from the perennial intersection of the visible with the invisible. The spasmodic search for truths, even if it can be relative. To create works means to walk a bridge between the two worlds and to be able to tell what I believe I have learnt from this journey.
I strongly believe in the coexistence of worlds on different lengths of spirit, my task is to explore them.
That is why my works are mostly simple strokes, in black and white, the purity of the emotion is a fundamental step towards understanding the whole.
Art is creating what does not exist.
BAO: What difficulties, if any, do you face today in making your art well-known? What would you need?
Cripe: The difficulty I encounter today in making my art known is mostly due to the lack of spaces where I can exhibit my works and have total freedom to display the space as I see it best.
The images that are created to be published on social networks do not always convey clearly all that I have created.
In my opinion, it would be useful to bring people in touch with real art, alive and in the flesh. Social media has created an emptiness and detachment with regard to the empathy felt towards all forms of art.
To have the possibility to tell one’s story without any kind of filter, being able to make people understand that the world is not empty, there are millions of small realities to be told and explored.
Giving people the chance to explore small worlds that they would not otherwise have the chance to explore.
BAO: Where did your passion come from?
Cripe: It all started in 2016 with the beginning of a journey through which I had to explore myself in the most absolute totality, in order to seek answers in the motivations of the carnal and spiritual act of death; to be able to understand that an individual may or may not decide to live or die.
In 2019, I attended a seminar organised by the MAI (Marina Abramović Institute), with the aim of totally cleansing my body and spirit in order to be able to better focus on what I had achieved in the above mentioned journey.
The purity of emotion in the absence of food and external impulses was the key to understanding many questions.
The three years of research gave rise to an urgent need to express everything that my mind and spirit created; I began producing works as an outlet for questions that were much bigger than my flesh. Extremely unbearable and heavy to bear.
It all came about very naturally, I was on my way home from work and the extreme need to express in any way what I had learned over the years assailed me, but the material was so much that it was exorcised with the drawing of a simple dot on a blank canvas.
I feel so ashamed to show what I create because it is extremely intimate.
So I stopped at the first shop I saw where I could buy a canvas and a marker and I created, and from there I never stopped.
My very first approach to art dates back to my childhood, my maternal grandfather was a passionate opera singer. Classical music and the works of Giuseppe Verdi have been with me throughout my childhood, giving me a passionate love for music. An ever-present background for my creations.
BAO: How does your creative process unfold? What inspires you?
Cripe: My creative process is ongoing 24/365 days a year, the mind never stops working in search of questions that potentially have no answer.
Why do we live? Is there an afterlife dimension? Why can a man choose his life as if it were a matter of choosing what to have for lunch?
Being in constant motion my reservoir of ideas is easily filled, music is the perfect catalyst for my creations.
Once the reservoir is filled, it becomes quite natural to let my hand go completely as if it were an appendage of my spirit.
This is where my creations come from.
BAO: How do you think authenticity relates to artistic creation? How do you experience it in your creative process?
Cripe: I believe authenticity is the fundamental step in a creative process, technically it is the “correspondence with the truth”, everyone should be free to be able to express, illustrate, sing, etc. their own truth.
What I create is a representation of my truth, as my eyes and spirit observe it. As I said before, I believe that art is creating something that has never existed before, something so authentic that it has never been thought of or created.
The relationship with it is extremely deep, it is the naturalness of my creative process.
