Nevercrew, the street art duo hailing from Switzerland, has acquired notoriety thanks to their passion for artfully depicting the entangled forces of human society and nature. This month, they completed two large scale works in Europe that directly communicate this consistent theme in a perpetually evolving fashion.
Celsius
The pair harnessed the power of innovation in completing “Celsius”, which they state is a “thermochromic mural painting that reacts to temperature change.” The mural can be found at the non-profit cultural space Morel in Lugano, Switzerland.
In a press release for the project, Nevercrew says “this is part of a project on which we’re working [for] years, in the search for artworks that could react directly to reality, to human action and to human influence, with a direct focus on environmental changes.” The mural features a family of three whales, floating in a neat stack. They are arranged in descending size, and the directions they’re facing alternate, which lends the piece a sense of organization that can be rare for the duo’s work. Their colors are stark, striking, and somewhat futuristic, bordering dystopian. Most notably though, the mural utilizes an innovative type of paint that changes color with temperature fluctuations, revealing the whales’ skeletons when exposed.
Their press release states that this effect allows them “to create an immediate transformation and at the same time a silent litmus paper of the actual situation. ‘Celsius’ becomes then a timeline and a scale who wants to relate with today’s global and local choices while unavoidably including past and future in an interconnected overview.”
This statement regarding the urgency of caring for our environment proves a poignant fit for the work’s location. Morel’s website says the space “is located in the last industrial building in the center of Lugano, a former Fiat car dealer built between the 1940s and the 1980s.” No longer a beacon of industry, the building’s new mission “is to work with national and international artists and musicians within an experimental and aggregative environment.” It opened in February 2017 under the direction of the cultural association Drunken Sailors. It will close with its scheduled demolition in the summer of 2019.
Cluster n°3
Nevercrew also recently completed a mural titled “Cluster n°3” in Giessen, Germany for River Tales Festival. This work is the latest in their renowned cluster series, which illustrates nature’s chaotic attributes, using sophisticated composition to illuminate “the perception of the whole and of humankind’s position within it.” In their release, the pair continue on to state that the work highlights “a position that’s a weight in a balance, and a responsibility that demands to become aware of it, of proportions and of imbalances.”
The arrangement and message of this mural elaborate on earlier works in the series, the last of which we covered at the beginning of December 2018. Here, the whales are swirled into a circle, bound by a core of solid sky blue at their center. They are shown next to a scale key of the solar system below, asserting their importance relative to the other heavenly bodies and what appears to be a small figure symbolizing the cogs of mechanical industry. The cluster is so much larger than these other entities that the message about nature’s importance rings startlingly clear.
Nevercrew’s decision to continue the cluster series for RIVER TALES festival suits the event’s ethos. Its website says that through its mission to “redesign [the] city, countryside and river through contemporary urban art with street art and mural art,” it “aims to create a new access to the river and raise awareness of the important lifeline ‘Our rivers and streams.’”
Each of these new pieces by Nevercrew use whales to symbolize the relationship between nature and civilization, an interaction that the artists strive to portray throughout their entire body of work. The RIVER TALES Festival’s mission encompasses this theme with one succinct sentence: “We want a rethinking of industry, consumers and politics in dealing with our waters. Each of us should deal cautiously with the element water and appreciate our rivers.” The latest additions to Nevercrew’s impressive body of work serves to further give power to this goal.
