Photo by Nika Kramer (detail)
NEVERCREW is a swiss artists duo composed by Christian Rebecchi (Lugano, 1980) and Pablo Togni (Bellinzona, 1979).
Since 1996 their artistic path developed mainly in the urban art context with the realization of mural paintings, installations and sculptures. Their work takes shape worldwide and rotates around the concept of comparison connected to the relationship between humankind and nature and between humankind and “systems”, with a focus on environmental and social topics.
Since 1996 their artistic path developed mainly in the urban art context with the realization of mural paintings, installations and sculptures. Their work takes shape worldwide and rotates around the concept of comparison connected to the relationship between humankind and nature and between humankind and “systems”, with a focus on environmental and social topics.
"Art manifests its social nature through its dissemination in urban spaces. When freely present in cities, art acquires even more value and relevance for our lives. These two principles inspire the artists of Nevercrew, Christian Rebecchi and Pablo Togni. Their works reduce the distance between city art and everyday life by intervening in urban spaces and adding something that modifies and thus becomes a part of the landscape. They achieve this outcome through their use of graphic design, painting, and sculpture. Their activities develop through essential stages of synthesis and composition that are pivotal for the development of their works and for establishing the necessary relationships between works of art and the context in which they develop. Rebecchi and Togni’s ecological approach to reality and their attention to contemporary issues concerning the environment and nature influence their poetics. Each of their works is indeed a pretext to rethink our social reality, that is, the relationship with the public sphere and the artifices that make the production of images possible."
Davide Dal Sasso
NEVERCREW's work focuses on the relationship between mankind and nature and on the relationship between mankind and the system, in particular on the effects of human attitudes on the environment, on social injustices and on the relationship between the concept and the forms of "systems" and an essential, natural, human and animal truth.
Working together since more than twenty years, Christian Rebecchi & Pablo Togni developed the issue of the comparison and at the same time, interacting in the public spaces, they extended this confrontation outside in a direct way, making this perennial dual "discussion" one of the hubs of their work. From this point of view, working on the direct communication inherent in the idea of public art, their message travels on a transversal way that meets the different scenarios on which it lives, such as politics, environment, society. NEVERCREW therefore works then on particular “living systems”, overviews that are made perceptible in their totality and in their structure by the act of sectioning, which allows to see them as they are inside while maintaining the perceptible global shape. They apply and generate a "simultaneous vision", which starts from the individual mechanical or natural components up to the overall composition given by the association of different subjects, and then finally expand out automatically in a direct and personal relationship with the observer and the environment.
What NEVERCREW seeks is both a direct impact and a slow and deep reaction, aiming to stimulate a spatial, empathic and emotional interaction. The goal is to interact with "perspectives", evoking a global participation within a system, stimulating the idea of an active participation of each single element with its cause and effect; the interest is to develop a method to incorporate everything into a broader and more global topic that could gradually shows itself as a whole and be readable in every component in a vision of total and inevitable relationship between everything, between all parts, where only the point of view, the location within a system, defines a selection.
The style of NEVERCREW is visually and technically hybrid: they combine a simple graphic structure with hyperrealistic and formally complex elements, two-dimensional compositions and sculptural installations, ideally breaking down the different spatial planes and highlighting the physical dimensions. When they intervene in a place, their approach is not to create an image, but rather to place the elements within the space in relation to the context, with the aim of generating a direct comparison inside and outside the work. The idea of "construction" and "composition" is therefore the one that best defines their work, and it is present in their process at different levels: there are both a definite graphic composition, which structures the skeleton of the intervention, and a composition-selection of elements which, when confronted and combined, in turn form new parts. In these structures, natural and artificial elements are related in a declaredly forced equilibrium: living elements and inanimate elements, mechanical and biological, material and animal elements.
Among the artificial elements there are the mechanisms, an often inconspicuous element that for NEVERCREW represents very well their work and their approach. For the realization of these machines, in fact, they resort to an archive of components that they have built over the years, proceeding each time to their composition in relation to the context in which they will be inserted and to the global idea. These mechanisms, ideally and visually related to each other, then become an allegory of the overall work, emphasizing at a first level their very nature of systems and thus recalling the system of the work and the one in which the work is inserted, in a collaborative relationship between parts and everything. As natural elements they alternate living subjects that can have a symbolic and evocative value in reference to the relationship with mankind and with the territory, to others that can instead directly recall the territory or natural resources. Among these there is, for example, the whale: at the same time far from a direct human experience, but part of the collective imagination and strongly linked to the past and present history of current civilizations. The history of the relationship between mankind and cetaceans is in fact particularly emblematic of what is still the relationship between systems' policies and natural resources. The whale, for NEVERCREW, brings with it all its history, the excessive power of industry, exploitation, dehumanization, pollution, while maintaining a strong empathic and communicative value as a living being in an absolute, almost iconic and decontextualized sense.
Finally, there is the relationship between time and space linked to their interventions, the path, which is created automatically with the stratification of the language and with the use of elements more and more connected to each other (but that NEVERCREW uses to trace and underline also through spatial coordinates) and that helps to recall once again a simultaneous overview of both details: on the one hand above borders and systems and on the other "personal" and single, linked to the specific place. What NEVERCREW tries to remember is therefore mainly the feeling of being part of a system, of being part of it and of being able to observe it from a certain point of view, for what it is and for what it might be, putting the human element at the center like living subject and external to the work, and trying to bring it to reflect on this position.