Turin, two hands shake for Saype's global land art project

Turin welcomes Beyond Walls - Oltre i muri, a Land Art project by French-Swiss artist Saype, supported by the Lavazza Group in collaboration with the City of Turin and the Royal Museums of Turin. At the center of the project is the artist’s work: two hands reaching out toward each other and shaking to signify trust and mutual aid.

The Royal Museums supports the project because of its desire to link the heritage of classical arts to contemporary artistic expressions, contributing to one of the most important artistic interventions on a global scale in recent years. Beyond Walls is one more piece in the “largest human chain in history,” spanning five continents for more than twenty different cities; Turin’s is the seventh stage of a global project born in 2019 in Paris, and the Piedmontese capital welcomes it in the Archaeological Park of the Palatine Gate.

The choice to place the work at one of the city’s gateways further highlights Saype’s desire to overcome physical and mental walls. Each individual hand that belongs to the Beyond Walls project, with its details that refer to different ethnicities, backgrounds, and cultures, represents the kaleidoscope of an ever-evolving humanity that is unwilling to be stopped by restrictions and walls and is a spokesperson for tolerance and inclusion.

Saype (Belfort, 1989) fuses the immediacy and social engagement of street art and the consciousness of land art in his art. He creates his works with full respect for nature: they are monumental-sized paintings made on grass with biodegradable pigments. Saype’s huge paintings (a name born from the contraction of “say peace”) have an average duration ranging from 15 to 90 days and refer to the impermanence of existence and the relationship between all living forms.

The project is also accompanied by Saype’s first solo exhibition that can be visited in the central halls of the Sabauda Gallery of the Royal Museums in Turin, until January 17, 2021, reconstructing the poetics, career and technique of Saype’s famous Foot Murals made around the world. The exhibition is curated by Roberto Mastroianni and Filippo Masino and is open to the public Tuesday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

“Saype’s large grass paintings demonstrate how painting is still today a terrain of great technical and visual research, whose frontiers are expanding by taking advantage of aerial technologies and the potential for global reverberation in media, but always keeping the talent of the hand and the invention of the artist central. The Royal Museums welcomes his work in Turin, which carries with it an important message of humanity and concern for the environment and seriously addresses the sustainability of the artistic intervention itself,” commented Royal Museums Director Enrica Pagella.

Turin, two hands shake for Saype's global land art project

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