Rigo 23

Rigo 23 ,Untitled, 2006

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Rigo (b.1966, Madeira Island, Portugal) takes advantage of the ubiquity of traffic signage in the organisation of modern cities, and has produced outdoor monument-size murals using signs with politically ambiguous words. It is hardly surprising that amidst the sea of billboards promising to transport us to a world elsewhere, we can often overlook what is right under our noses. Rigo's playful interventions are designed to resituate us in reality.

A nomadic artist, an urban interventionist, a muralist, a conceptualist, and above all a political activist, Rigo creates work that is site-specific and context-sensitive, and often informed by his political activism. He interacts with contexts and places, appropriating the vernacular, inducing participation, reorienting and reinventing space, commenting on the urgencies of everyday life and history, and addressing unspoken political issues.

Over the years, he has been involved with Robert King, one of three political prisoners known as the ‘Angola Three’, and made a series of works related to King’s experience and to prison in general.

The four stone lions on St George's Plateau are nineteenth-century manifestation of an iconography which stretches back to ancient Assyria and Babylon. For millennia, the lion has been employed by ruling elites as a symbol of power and dominance. In Rigo's intervention for International 06, the Liverpool lions ironically regain their capacity to harm precisely through the act of being caged.

Rigo 23 at Liverpool Biennial 2006

Untitled, 2006
Intervention with historic monuments
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2006 
Exhibited at St. George's Plateau

Untitled, 2006
Vinyls
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2006
Exhibited at Liverpool John Lennon Airport