108, born Guido Bisagni (1978, Alessandria) is an Italian muralist and multidisciplinary artist that works with painting, sculpture and site specific — often musical — installations. His practice derives from a fertile and unique amalgam between Early ‘900 vanguards, ancestral symbolisms and graffiti. He started his artistic path from the abandoned architectures and the neglected and often overlooked industrial spaces so characteristic of his hometown Alessandria and it is in those very places that his painting was able to grow both stylistically and formally making of him one of the first European muralist to deal with abstract forms in the Late Nineties and one of the pioneers of Post—Graffitism.
Originally consisting of mysterious and often large abstract black shapes invading the city spaces and then from Years ‘10 evolving into more delicate mixtures of coloured and often geometrical spots enhancing still mostly pitch black forms, his work has grown throughout the years fertile, recognised and incredibly influential. In the last 15 years 108 has been given the occasion to exhibit extensively around Europe and U.S.A., in such events as The Venice Biennale (Walls, 2007) and juxtaposed to originals from artists as Vassily Kandinsky, Jean Arp e Imre Reiner (La Forma e l’Ignoto Ego Gallery [Lugano, 2015]).
Dark while delicately coloured, impulsive while balanced, detailed but extremely simple, his artworks has the nature of dreams and spells. They draw the observer into a challenging place where the shadows take physical form and the shapes, in their curves and angles, become like words of poetry. 108’s art has in fact a timeless nature and a brutal and gentle touch at once that gives to his artworks a impalpable, warm and magic soul which feels as old and mysterious as petroglyphs while being incredibly refined and delicate as a philosophy in geometries.
In Svärtans Orolighet 108 presents a new series of works that explores his current art but with an approach that goes back to the very roots of its production. With a definitely experimental and free-form attitude and working mostly on paper, his artworks for the show revolve around the colour black and the very monochrome forms which have been the ideas at the core of his art from the very beginning. Svärtans Orolighet is also 108 first solo exhibition in Sweden and in a Scandinavian Country.
108, Svärtans Orolighet, Gothenburg: Nevven Editions, 2015 — Fanzine catalog