PONGO BIOGRAPHY AND PAINTING CONCEPTS
Around the mid-1980s, during a work stay with his father in New York, he encountered street art.
After graduating from art school, his desire to "scratch" the city's skin in urban and suburban spaces grew stronger.
He chose a name: Pongo.
PONGO is a Wildstyler, and as such, he researches, designs, and evolves the structures of letters, writing, and urban imagery.
He paints on all surfaces, with a particular attraction to trains and subways, but without neglecting the large walls of suburban areas, becoming one of the most prominent figures in Italy.
Very active both in Milan and internationally, he participates in events across Europe, while his connections with NYC intensify. He joins the TNB and initiates artistic collaborations with the TAT, famous historic New York groups active since the 1970s and considered pioneers of writing.
His street writing activity lasts several years, until 2000.
Despite his frequent travels to the U.S. and collaborations with his New York colleagues, his painting on canvas and other materials goes through various phases.
During one of his stays in New York, he accidentally finds a publication in the MoMA bookstore that recalls the 1950s and the 3D movies viewed with cardboard glasses and red-and-blue plastic lenses.
The artist’s mind is a space of transformation, where a simple, quick stimulus can alchemically synthesize into new imagination.
Questo è l’attimo che Pongo ha saputo fermare e rigenerare per un nuovo pensiero d’arte.
In an era where technology is rapidly replacing the painter's role, Pongo decides to reverse the past into a new future, substituting computer programs by painting manually with brushes and 3D colors.
The subjects of his paintings transform in the viewer's eyes and emerge from the canvases in relief, toward a virtual future with the help of 1950s-style red-and-blue glasses.
Since then, Federico Pongo has added "3D" to his signature to mark the origin of his paintings, which exalt the artificiality of art and its falsehood. The arrival of the new millennium was experienced as year zero, a symbol of a new beginning, which, like everything new, brings both enthusiasm and fear.
Pongo is aware of the therapeutic power of positive imagination.
His 3D paintings, viewed through the playful glasses, lighten the fears that shook society in the previous millennium—“a thousand and no more than a thousand”—and instead, they look toward the future.
He paints unexplored landscapes resembling asteroids, programmed by illogical mathematical formulas, to pose questions about human growth, while still embracing his frontier practices with spray cans and his experience with public art. These have placed him among the most important image creators for large international companies and major institutions, such as the Design Museum of Milan, Nike, car brands like Nissan and Kia, fashion brands like C.P. Company, Blauer U.S.A., Dr. Martens, Etro, and luxury watchmaker Roger Dubuis, among many others.
In 2013, he presented his conceptual paintings at the Pow Gallery: PONGO 3D: WITHOUT TRUTH - SCRATCHING THE FUTURE WITHOUT TRUTH.
These are paintings that simulate the 3D technique and surpass the virtuality of computers.
The intensely attractive visions of his paintings, however, conceal a deeper "truth": the fragility of the ecosystem, endangered by the blindness of humans and nations.
This awareness drives his creativity toward a new consciousness, leading him to reflect on the phrase with which Luis Buñuel explained the title of his famous film The Phantom of Liberty, stating, "conformity makes freedom invisible, like ducks in a row, where all the ducks follow the first."
This metaphor ignited Pongo's imagination, convinced that the artifice of his lighthearted and ironic 3D painting could transform the "ducks" into true contemporary stars, reinterpreted as portraits rooted in the collective memory of art history.
In Pongo 3D's artworks, these appropriations produce different levels of interpretation.
