HOW SHAMEFUL JORIT'S HUG WITH PUTIN IN MARCH 2024!! THE AUTHORS OF THIS POST WILL NO LONGER FOLLOW AN ARTIST WHO LENDS HIMSELF TO THE PROPAGANDA OF A KILLER REGIME.
First edition: 3 July 2018
A new mural by Jorit in April 2023, this time in the hilly area of Naples, at Arenella and more precisely at Via Domenico Fontana 172, on a wall of the "Elio Vittorini" scientific and linguistic high school. In this institute the journalist, activist and volunteer Mario Paciolla studied, assassinated at the age of 33 in Colombia during the exercise of his duties as UN observer of the agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC, even though attempts are made by many to pass the thesis of an improbable suicide.
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A new update to this post that was born in 2018. We are in February 2021 and Jorit has reached an important milestone, completing the fifth mural in the Rione Cavour, in Barra, eastern suburb of Naples. The artist from Quarto has renamed the district in Rione dei Sogni (District of Dreams), and we will see why. First let's look at a panoramic photo with four of the five murals, taken, like the following ones, from Jorit's site:
Let's start with the detailed photos, starting from the mural of Salvador Allende, made with the Chilean artist Mono Gonzalez:
a Palestinian child with a kefia, made with the Neapolitan artist Tukios and with the Peruvian Calaveras:
Martin Luther King:
three children sleeping and dreaming:
and finally the only mural that is not seen in the first photo and which was created by the Chilean artist Inti; represents a girl with the universe background:
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October 2020 update to this constantly evolving post, thanks to Jorit's inventiveness: this time the street artist from Quarto has dedicated a mural to a personage who, like it or not, has been expressing Neapolitan popular culture in the field of music for several decades . We are talking about Nino D'Angelo, to whom Jorit dedicated a portrait that can be seen in Piazza Guarino, in the Neapolitan district of San Pietro a Patierno, where the musician was born; the painting portrays him in his youth, those of the "helmet":
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A fresh update to Jorit's murals: this is the painting that the artist has created in recent days inside the basketball court of the Montedonzelli Park, located in Via Francesco dell'Erba (Line 1 of the Metro, MONTEDONZELLI station; if you arrive by car there is a parking). The work depicts the recently deceased American basketball player Kobe Bryant.
It should be added that the park has been restored thanks to the intervention of 150 volunteers and the funding of Nick Ansom, president of the Venice Basketball League, and this is the result (waiting for the Municipality to finance the safety of the plant):
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Let's go back to talk about our street artist Jorit, who continues to work in Italy and abroad, with his murals always careful to portray personages connected to social commitment or to decorate socially important structures such as schools, hospitals or suburban buildings. Let's see some of his most recent creations: the last, finished these days, is the mural dedicated to Martin Luther King, located in the Neapolitan suburb of Barra on Via Gerardo Chiaromonte:
Another significant work dates back to November 2019: we are talking about a double mural, depicting the face of a Madonna and the reproduction of the stained glass window of a Spanish cathedral, made on the north side of the Santa Maria delle Grazie Hospital in Pozzuoli, near the entrances. of the emergency room and outpatient clinics. On one of the days of work, Jorit had some exceptional helpers: some young people diagnosed with autism who attend the ASL Napoli 2 Nord BlunAuti center, the only public rehabilitation center for patients with autism in Campania.
Another important personage, but perhaps few people remember, is Thomas Sankara, the president of Burkina Faso, deposed and killed in 1987 by a coup d'état, after trying to make his country a territory free from exploitation and neo-colonialism. . In the same mural Jorit represented a child to whom he gave the name of Kukaa, which in Swahili means "to stay" and which represents, even if in an idealized way, the child drowned in the Mediterranean and found with the school report card sewn to the inside of the clothes. The mural is located in Palma Campania at Via Alcide De Gasperi 111:
But we cannot close this first update of 2020 without remembering Jorit's participation in the International Urban Morphogenesis Festival, which in August 2019 gathered street artists from all over the world to paint the facades of about thirty condominiums located in Odintsovo, near Moscow. Jorit participated by painting a 60-meter mural dedicated to Juri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut in the world who in 1961 gave Soviet Union a momentary record in the race to space:
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Another subject strongly characterized from a social point of view, for our Jorit: we are talking about the mural dedicated to the journalist Giancarlo Siani, killed by the Camorra in 1985 for his insightful investigations. But perhaps more significant is the place where the painting was installed: it is the former Resit landfill, in the municipality of Giugliano (NA), which was reclaimed with the planting of twenty thousand poplars and eight years of work, under the guide by commissioner Mario De Biase, a work of which you can find an extensive description on the Neapolitan page of Repubblica of 27 July 2019. To date (31 July 2019) the intended use of this park is still awaited.
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The so-called institutional path of our street artist Jorit continues: in these days at the end of June 2019 he has just completed a gigantic mural (100 meters high, a first!) On a tower of the Naples Business Center. The work was commissioned on the occasion of the Universiade which is about to begin on 3 July and represents the faces of five champions of Campania sport, one for each province: they are the boxer Patrizio Oliva (Naples), the jumper Antonietta De Martino (Salerno ), the footballer Nando De Napoli (Avellino), the basketball player Nando Gentile (Caserta) and the footballer Carmelo Imbriani (Benevento):
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The second update of 2019 of this post: Jorit was commissioned a mural dedicated to Antonio Cardarelli, the great doctor, professor and senator of the Kingdom of Italy to whom the largest hospital in the South is dedicated, the Cardarelli Hospital in Naples. And right close a wall of a Cardarelli pavilion this mural was created, clearly visible from the outside, complete with a caption in favor of the public health system:
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The first update of 2019 to this post we are particularly fond of: we show you the two latest works by Jorit, the portraits of Angela Davis and Pier Paolo Pasolini that can be easily reached with Line 1 of the Metro getting off at the Piscinola - Scampia terminus; at the exit we find them right in front. If you prefer the car, the avenue that you see in the center is Via Piero Gobetti:
Below we left the original text of the post published in July 2018:
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We are almost there: in a few days our blog COMMA 2 will be one year old, and to celebrate it we have decided to do something new and certainly unusual. In fact, we will take you around the suburbs of Naples and neighboring countries, in search of the murals of Jorit Agoch. He is a young painter born in Quarto (NA) from a Neapolitan father and a Dutch mother; the guy has been working for years on buildings in the peripheral areas, transforming entire walls of anonymous buildings into real works of art, created with the use of spray cans. First of all, the artist's website: www.jorit.it, where you will find a catalog of the works outdoors and those on canvas, the link to the Facebook page, a press and video review and above all an intense description of the strong motivations that are the basis of the work of this guy, who in addition to Italy has worked a lot in Africa, Chile, Cuba, New York, Lisbon and other "locations". Jorit chooses to operate almost always in popular and problematic areas; in order to work he avails himself of the collaboration of public bodies and private companies that commission these works, which are rather demanding from a technical and organizational point of view. For this tour of ours, you need a car, a good navigator and preferably a companion to take photos in rather busy streets, where it can sometimes be difficult to park and get off with the wheelchair. Let's start with what perhaps at this moment is the best known work, which is located in the Neapolitan district of San Giovanni a Teduccio, at Viale Due Giugno (set number 10 on the navigator):
The personage on the right, Maradona, is all too well known to be able to say anything new about it; a few words should instead be spent on Niccolò, the person depicted on the building on the left. It is an autistic boy, who unfortunately is no longer here and whose parents speak in a touching way in a post that is easily found on Jorit's Facebook page. The red marks on the face, recurrent in the works of this artist, mark, so to speak, the belonging of the portrayed characters to what he defines as a "human tribe". Taking the road to the right of Maradona, you arrive at the opposite end of the two buildings, where Jorit painted another very popular icon, a Che Guevara with a face divided into two halves that each occupy a facade of a building:
Another particularly significant work is the one called Ael, which represents a Rom girl portrayed on the external wall of a house in the Neapolitan district of Ponticelli, in Viale Aldo Merola; the choice of the subject is motivated by the fact that in Ponticelli last year a Rom camp was set on fire:
Jorit also worked in his hometown, Quarto, where we find this other very popular personage, the Napoli footballer Hamsik, portrayed on a wall of the Viviani school at Via Guglielmo Marconi 2B in Quarto:
Returning from Quarto to Naples we pass through the Provincial Road Montagna Spaccata, where we find a painting also connected to a tragic news story of 2014, the death of the young Davide Bifolco at the hands of a policeman then convicted in the first degree for manslaughter; Davide's eyes are those in the center, while the others are those of young people from the Rione Traiano, another peripheral and "difficult" district of Naples:
In this close-up photo you can read the word DAVIDE on the iris of the eye:
And in the Rione Traiano we can find this mural painted under an overpass of Via Cassiodoro, in which Jorit represented the art critic Achille Bonito Oliva; the latter, in an interview in 2015, expressed appreciation for this, albeit irreverent tribute:
We move to San Giorgio a Cremano, the Vesuvian town of Massimo Troisi; here Jorit has created, on the side wall of the Palaveliero (Via Roberto Galdieri 3), a mural dedicated to the actor and director who died in 1994:
But also in the historic center of Naples we find traces of Jorit's work; more precisely, in Piazza Eduardo De Filippo is the historic Teatro San Ferdinando, taken over in 1948 by the great Neapolitan playwright who made it the seat of his activity until 1980. On the portcullises there are images of Eduardo inspired by the his best known interpretations:
But our artist also made (October 2018) a foray into Vomero, a district that is not at all comparable to a suburb. In particular, the intervention took place on the external wall of what will be a Social Center built by the Municipality of Naples in a former electrical substation of the ATAN trolleybuses, located in Via Francesco Verrotti and recently restored. The subject, for those who do not recognize her, is Ilaria Cucchi.
Another "prestigious" mural is the one created (November 2018) in Florence, to celebrate Nelson Mandela:
And we close with an image that those who frequent this blog already know: it is the mural of San Gennaro which is located at the beginning of the Forcella district, on the building in Via Vicaria Vecchia 33, and which is clearly visible from Via Duomo, as documented in our post dedicated to Line 1 of the Metro:
For the moment we stop here: the search for Jorit's murals is not always easy, even when you know the address; but we will certainly return to add new ones as soon as possible, because these works give us a great emotion that we hope to have shared with the visitors of COMMA 2.