“Sub-Rural.5 #2” Sperandio Mural, Berlin

This is my second mid-month mini-blog, an opportunity to cover supplementary art events lying outside the largely Chicago and Great Lakes focus of “Sub-rural.” Selection, however, is still determined by inland artists or issues. Here is “Sub-Rural.5 #2” or just “Point five #2”

PK

While curating a show in central Berlin’s Neurotitan Gallery Christopher Sperandio was invited to paint a mural in the Schwarzenberg courtyard. The surrounding district is renowned for its urban architecture, part decrepit, part preserved, that includes a mix of significant political and cultural histories. Some straßen are represented by insurgent murals, alternative spaces, and squats amid once-clandestine cold war era addresses with John le Carré-worthy enigmas. The Schwarzenberg sits in the city’s former Soviet sector.

Sperandio is noted for daily drawings on his Instagram site which mixes classic comic styles, activist subjects, and much MAGA criticism. He’s also influential with his publications on print technologies as well as a substantial body of large-scale painting installations that are radical in terms of text and figuration. He fuses classic comic interpretations with damning social narratives and underground volatility and the results are candid, authorial, and punishing.

The Berlin mural is an explosive black & white image of the unhinged stare of POTUS stretched across the bottom half of a 30 ft. wide public wall. Above is an extended block type in a torturous speech bubble with the non-bon mot “BIGLY!” applying enough pressure to make any autocrat register extreme on the logorrhea spectrum.