Pop culture icons, porn stars and little fat kids-- Valerio makes prints of them all. The Italian artist takes junky pictures of Sinatra in lockup, Elvis looking shifty and porn stars looking, ah, naked and tears them, splashes colours on them and generally makes them pleasing to the eyeballs.
The silk screen prints (which are made using whatever he finds in his garage-- hence the sometimes questionable looking texture) are repeated several times, but with a variation on each piece. No two prints look the same, with collages of text, paint splatters and other images creating layered artworks that are hard not to like.
Having entered the art world as part of Rome based collective Punk Surrealism, who did a lot of wheat pasting of graphics on the streets of his home city, it seems like Valerio has lost none of that pop art influence. Although he say that initially street art was simply a way of illegally self promoting his art and trying to get noticed, and what he's doing now is "something more introspective and meaningful", we think there is still an echo of vandalism about it (and that's a good thing).
More at
valeriopierbattista.com.