In the art exhibition at Palazzo Ruzzini, titled Six in Venice, from April 18 to Nov. 24, 2024, the artist:

PRALINE COSMICHE

Ligurian by birth and Milanese by adoption, Praline Cosmiche is a street artist who has devoted much of his time to drawing and graffiti since childhood. Always a lover of 80s icons, comic books, sci-fi settings and video games, he assimilates in his mind the images of that era and reproposes them, from the beginning in the urban context, then on the canvas, emphasizing more and more a pop-matrix interpretative model, through the use of vivid colors to attract the attention of the masses and the choice of current themes of personal, social, ethical and environmental denunciation. Hence, the contemporary reflection of the work of Cosmic Praline, which stems from the contrast between topical revolutionary content and symbols that characterize the years of American capitalism, where anything seemed possible and where personal affirmation, the welfare of Western countries and rampant carefreeness fueled the uses of the period. 

Characterized by the typical reactionary condition in which street art is developed, Cosmic Praline reinterprets, with sarcastic and sometimes even cynical irony, his personal activist streak through art, and offers it to the public with ever-changing techniques and continuous experimentation. In addition to the distinctive expressive means of street art such as spray cans, stencils, and acrylic paints, he tries his hand at using unconventional tools such as grids to give an optical texture to the background, bags and sponges to give strength and geometry to the compositions of his works, and detergents that, by hindering the attachment of color, create a stain effect left to chance. 

These technical experiments also give rise to the works on display at Palazzo Ruzzini in Venice, which depict emblematic figures of social minorities and states of mind that draw, to the viewer's attention, topical issues.

In Toxic Childhood, a child wears a protective mask and is absorbed in imaginative thoughts in which he imagines a utopian world without conflict or hunger, where nature is free from 'pollution and where his peers can experience childlike carefreeness without the contaminations and dangers of the outside world. Subjectivity that struggles to relate and integrate into society is represented by Ariel, a character with androgynous physicality decorated by geometric shapes and textures that emphasize the multitude of insecurities and fears and the versatility of a disposition that struggles to find its space, and by Geometric Wave, a black man encompassed in graphics that recall the fusion of art and advertising of the 1980s.

Street and pop at the same time, Praline Cosmiche's artistic journey, autonomous and non-canonical, defines the response to the need to express a message of revolt and the intention to intercept everyone's sensibility through the inclusion of everything that unlocks the memories of one's childhood. 

Text by

Livia Ruberti

SIX IN VENICE. Ruzzini Palace celebrates the talents of six artists.

This collaboration marks another strong signal of support for art, offering hotel guests a unique opportunity to immerse themselves 

into the artistic universe of Italian ultra-contemporary art