Corn79

Riccardo “Corn79” Lanfranco is born in Turin in 1979.
He is graduated in the faculty of DAMS by the University of Turin – multimedia course degree, with a graduation thesis about semiotics titled “ Beauty and decay of the city. Contemporary projects for mural painting and aesthetic requalification in Italy”- but his professional and artistic career as a writer started in early 1996.
From early on his works have been published in all major street-art magazines (Aelle, Defrag, Stylefile, Xplicit Grafx, Innercity, etc..), he also takes part in numerous conventions and exhibition and creates artwork in many European countries.
With various other world-renowned artists, he has created important murals for the requalification of urban areas, up until 2009 he was a member of the Opiemme collective. Promoter of the creation of the ‘Murarte’ project of the city of Turin, Italy, in 2001 he founded “il Cerchio e le Gocce” (www.ilcerchioelegocce.com), the first Italian association dedicated to the promoting of urban creativity.
Through the years thanks to the support of the association he has created and been the
artistic director of important projects involving urban culture such as: Street Attitudes (one of the main graffiti conventions in Italy, www.streetattitudes.com), the decoration of the Toroc headquarters ( Organizing committee of the 20th 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin), the RFI train station of Moncalieri, Turin Polytechnic, installations of artists such as Blu, Run and the Rebel Ink collective , projects like “Segni d’Europa” or “U.R.C.A”, a course in decoration held within the Comunità Arcobaleno of Turin Prison, the project “Muridamare” for Imperia municipality winner of the ANCI’s competition “Giovani idee in commune”, culminating with the “Picturin Festival” (www.picturin-festival.com), one of the largest urban art festivals ever held in Europe.
From 2008 he is the owner of “Drip Studio”, a studio specialized in Visual communication. PHILOSOPHY In 1996, the beginning: the first approach with mainly casual supports, as a Graffiti Writer. Up until now, Riccardo “Corn79” Lanfranco’s artistic path has expressed a legacy with muralism, in its widest expressive range, with an approach towards public creativity which makes urban requalification its trigger and reason for being. From this standpoint, Corn79’s distinctive graffiti signature style is a combination of original calligraphic solutions, coloring effects, geometric shapes and their conciliation with an urban setting. And not only that. In fact, Corn79’s current career does not involve only graffiti, as it branches into a heterogeneous and disparate way, free from continuum: from walls to urban art, canvas, all the way to installations. Different materials, media and supports interchange to express a research which breaks boundaries giving way to an eclectic mix. In Corn79’s works the graphic design trends of the seventies conjoin with influences from psychedelic art, which tend towards a kind of mysticism tinged with both oriental and western flavors. Complex artwork, in which it is easy to abandon a univocal point of view and to find apparently contrasting inputs and cues, which vary according to the watcher’s inclinations. A reference to futurism – in search of that “geometric and mechanic splendor” described by Marinetti – which one can interpret as a personal reinterpretation of the kinetic laws dear to Optical Art; or associate with pure form, as typical of modernist aesthetics. In an analogous manner circles, always present in Corn79’s work, can be read as Mandalas or Yantras, and at the same time be recognized as the ideal shapes imagined by Pythagoras and Plato, and later on referred to by Bohm. Sacred geometry, the mechanics of two-dimensional shapes which long for three-dimensionality, Mandalas and Op Art righteously combine in an aesthetic research which can be interpreted as a revelation of an individual and collective unconscious, disclosing a kind of “syncretism”. Corn79’s work can thus be understood as an attempt to merge creation and fruition, in search of the perfect shape, able to embrace a many-sided and indefinitely extended “everything”, something which could reconcile single perceptions with a circular unicum, infinitely interconnected with itself.