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Fame and glory can wait for another day, say three Rome street artists.
For now, "they're very attached to their anonymity," said Elisabetta Giovagnoni, who owns a small art gallery near the Piazza Navona in Rome. "There's no narcissism."
Giovagnoni has taken the paradoxical step of exhibiting the work of three street artists, saying simply: "I wanted to show that they have talent."
On display are works she commissioned specially from the artists, who go by the pseudonyms Lex, Lucamaleonte and Sten, and whose main showcase is the streets of Rome.
Their preferred media are stencils and stickers, and they display their work mainly in Rome's lively San Lorenzo university district, far from the tourist meccas of the historic center. Street art and graffiti alike last longer in the area than in more elegant sections of the Eternal City.
Generally the size of a large handkerchief, many of the artists' images are portraits of cultural icons such as Clint Eastwood or Bob Marley, or simply of good friends. One piece by Lex depicts the Madonna and Child.
For the show at Giovagnoni's Contemporanea gallery, the three have hidden themselves behind a charming tale about the discovery by a passer-by of a quantity of stencils stashed in a trunk left by a rubbish bin near Rome's Villa Borghese in 1989.
"Realizing that the material was of enormous historical value ... (the passer-by) decided to restore the memory of these long-forgotten personages by reproducing their works thousands of times on the walls of Rome," the cover story goes.
The purported trunk contained a note reading: "Our names will never be revealed."
Street art -- a worldwide movement that took off in the late 1980s and now stretches from Melbourne to Paris to Buenos Aires -- "gives young artists a chance to show their work," said Giovagnoni, who met the trio at an international poster art festival here in June.
The proponents of street art are adamant that it has nothing to do with graffiti.
British street art guru Tristan Manco, in his book "Stencil Graffiti", sees precursors of street art in cave paintings, Egyptian pyramids and Art Nouveau stencils called "pochoirs", as well as the pop art of the 1950s.
Stencil graffiti has clear roots in the Italian fascist propaganda of the 1940s and Basque and Mexican political protests of the 1970s, he says.
Painting over graffiti is a thankless job in Rome, since it reappears quite often even before the whitewash is dry.
An exasperated Mayor Walter Veltroni last month proposed a registry for purchasers of spray paint, saying it would "serve everyone's sense of responsibility, because graffiti is a form of barbarism."
Giovagnoni agrees that graffiti is a "terrible problem" in Rome, but she said she was shocked by the left-wing mayor's draconian suggestion.
The street art community thrives on the Internet, where artists can show their work without fear of revealing their identities.
"The web helps us very much," 27-year-old Sten (short for stencil) told AFP -- on condition of anonymity, of course -- during a tour of works by the three artists.
"There's a connection between us street artists," Sten said, adding that when they travel abroad they often stay at fellow street artists' homes.
For her part, Giovagnoni said of the street artists she is promoting: "The quality is good. I'd rather see this in the streets than ads for cell phones."
However, she admitted: "Naturally (the works) have a limited lifespan."
The show at Giovagnoni's gallery runs until December 1.
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AFPEntertainment-street-art-Italy
AFP 171125 GMT 11 06
COPYRIGHT 2006 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.
