Street artists in Rome
When the streets become art

San Lorenzo: the heart of street art in the Italian capital. Interview with Sten, Lex and Lucamaleonte, the stars of Rome’s street art scene

By Francesco Paolo Del Re
november 2008

San Lorenzo, Rome’s student quarter, is also one of the liveliest centres for street art in the Italian capital. The walls offer a vast open air gallery of graffiti, posters, stencil art and stickers. At via Piceni 1 a new studio-gallery, Off the Street, has just been opened by Rome’s three most active and best known street artists Sten, Lex e Lucamaleonte. The trio have been working together for years and are the organisers of the annual «International Poster Art» exhibition at the Esc community centre in San Lorenzo.
Some have decried them as vandals, but they claim the status of art for their work – even when they choose as their canvas the walls and buildings of the city. Sten, Lex and Lucamaleonte started out by creating stencil art on the walls of San Lorenzo. Their work soon became hugely popular and some was even shown in galleries.
After returning from a tour of major street art events in London, Paris, Barcelona, New York and Oslo they came back to Rome to open their own studio-gallery. Every two months Off the Street will host exhibitions of street art from around the world. Until 20 December the gallery is featuring the latest works by its three owners in an exhibition called “Genesis”.

– What is Off the Street?
– Sten: “It’s our first studio, the place where our works take shape before we display them on the street or in galleries. It’s also a space for exhibitions and we hope it will become the centre of a worldwide network linking up artists who, like us, have been making stencil art for years.”
– Lex: “Off the Street is our headquarters, a place where people know they can find us. Those elusive characters with fantastic biographies which we’ve constructed through the internet and our street art, here become flesh and blood. It’s also a practical way of displaying our work without getting sucked into the commercial trap of the galleries. We also hope it will be a place for our work to be displayed alongside – and compared with – that of other artists.”

– Where did you get the name Off the Street?
– Sten: “Off the Street takes its name from the website www.stencilrevolution.com, one of the most important in the world. They have a section ‘on the street’ with works photographed in their original urban setting and another ‘off the street’ which has works made using the same techniques but designed for exhibition just like paintings. A work that was conceptualised as street art becomes a work for exhibition.

– What are your plans for this space?
– Lex: ”Recently we’ve been travelling abroad a lot and we’ve met many artists who’ve never had their work exhibited in Italy. We want to bring their work here, artists like us, who’ve been working for a long time along similar lines. We’re going to hold exhibitions every two months. As we’ve been doing with the annual independent festival “International Poster Art” which we’ve been organising in Rome since 2006, we want an event that gets off the ground without middle-men, with just the artists that we like. We want to raise the profile here in Italy of the best that the underground international art scene has to offer.”
– Lucamaleonte: ”It’s also a space for experimentation. An experience to share with the artists we’ve met around the world. We have always been inspired by the motto ‘do-it-yourself’, which is the basic idea behind the whole street culture movement.”

– What’s on display in “Genesis”?
– Lucamaleonte: ”I’m exhibiting my works which have never been shown in Italy before. Some have only been posted on the internet, others have only been in exhibitions abroad. They’re new stencils which I’ve cut out in the past few months from photographs I took myself. Then they were printed on canvas. There’s a self-portrait, a series of views of San Lorenzo, with the walls covered with graffiti and tags. There are also examples of my latest obsession: images of closed doors and windows.”
– Sten: ”I’ve got some new work in the show too, including posters on wood panels. Each one has a different subject, but they’re all in black and white.”
– Lex: ”There’s no common theme in the works I’m showing. I’ve made a selection of images, some taken from historic Italian banknotes. They’re all new works.”

– What’s the situation of street art in Italy now?
– Lex: “There’s enormous energy and change. Just look at the major exhibitions which have taken place in state-owned galleries in Rome and Milan. Street art is having a huge influence on the visual arts; it’s close to the kind of graphic art used in advertising. More and more it’s becoming a major element in contemporary creativity. Increasingly it’s becoming part of our collective visual consciousness.”
– Sten: “There’s a great Italian street artist called Blu: he climbs high off street level and uses his markers to create imaginary characters. He’s helped create a whole new style of Italian street art which I like a lot. The rest is crap – including my stuff.”
– Lucamaleonte: “I think things are more or less stationary, there’s been little change recently. I think the biggest obstacles are posed by the critics and by those who’d like to make money out of exploiting street artists – their art is born on the street and they haven’t got a commercial mentality.