CHANTE NIGHTZ, THE BEGINNING
William Baglione was born in May 1976 in São Caetano do Sul. Son of cousins, he grew up in Parque São Lucas, East Side of São Paulo, a time when Skateboarding, Graffiti, Pixação and the Post-Punk scene emerged as urban and avant-garde manifestations dictating the rhythm of teenage behavior at the end of the Military Dictatorship.
His first contact with art came from the creation of a clay piece in 1986. Three years later he began to write marginal poetry in a period of total isolation. In 1994 he formed a punk rock band with two friends and his brother Herbert, but they never recorded an album.
William's photography is more than a record of the now. It is the urgency to bring back some of that atmosphere lived in the late 80's, especially the use of neon colors and visual aggressiveness. Also pillars of his narratives are the explosion of sound, lights that hurt the eyes, posters, and underground cinema.
The women photographed by the artist reflect this subversive culture, creating a complex character, part of a fetishistic idea that smells like power, happiness, loneliness, and melancholy. It is an investigative process of human behavior provoked by the effect of music and colors, blackout and dream awakening, alcohol and smoke, irony and malice, and works as a manifest to the fantastic world of social networks.
This dreamlike universe William calls Chante Nightz.
B-MOVIE INFLUENCE
I am inspired by B-movie productions. This category emerged during the great North American depression in 1929 as a low-budget solution to be offered in movie theaters at that time.
From the 1950s on, this category was incorporated by smaller production companies and cinemas, using less popular casts and appealing themes with a tendency toward horror.
To promote the seventh art, posters with great visual impact were created. Paintings based on fantastic realism with refinement and design. The artists created paintings of giant insects, aliens, women in absurd proportions interacting with miniature scenery. This low-tech work influences pop culture to this day.
EATING STARS
Is the world changing or are the people?
Is social media a result of this evolution?
Those who grew up before the digital era are afraid of the future.
Those who were born after the analog era are nostalgic for a time they never lived. There is even a phenomenon with a very representative number of people from the new generation consuming flavored products from other decades. TV series and streaming, snack bars made in Brazil and global, clothes, accessories, haircuts, cassette tapes, vinyl records, and cameras. There are people making, selling, and developing their own films. Many make independent fanzines and silkscreen posters.
Instagram, this social network co-created by Brazilian Michel Krieger in 2010, was also born with this bias of vintage packaging in the digital age. There are many apps capable of transforming the photographs taken on our smartphones into something resembling the analog developing process. The polaroid is back and the Fuji Instax is a fever.
To talk about the Eating Stars project I had to perceive all these nuances lived between the 80's and the present period.
When I cover women's skin or put some cupcake confetti in their mouths, I am not summarizing an image in an eroticized moment with a bit of strangeness. The idea that builds this project goes further, as it brings some of this digital addiction. It is easy to understand why so-called "likes" are shaped like a heart and there are counters for everything: from followers to number of interactions with the content. This format is designed to cause physical and emotional dependence. In short, before you get any money from it it is important to reflect that we are treated as users. Simple as that.
The cupcake confectionery I use in the photographs is the same as that found at real social events, and when I insert this cheap element over the models it is nothing more than a symbol sweetened with a lot of irony.
SILENT LOVE
Silent Love is a project I started in 2014 in the city of La Rochelle, France. The idea initially was to use my own hand interacting with mannequins. The style of photography was P.O.V. (point of view) in allusion to porn industry movies and the hardening of relationships because of social media. As I have a big hand and crooked fingers, my hand was a strange element in the composition of the scene. Sometimes it is even too weird.
The photographic project has been transforming and, in this way, becoming more interesting. It includes stuffed animals and plastic animals interacting with the women in a fun, one hundred percent Nonsense, totally Chante Nightz atmosphere.
Part of what I offer to the world comes from improvisation and low technology bringing to life something that might be despicable to the adult, but in our intimacy we manifest love and develop an intimate relationship with things, sometimes talking about fantasy, sometimes talking about loneliness and boredom. Silent Love represents this, the one-sided loves or in other words, that platonic, cold, indifferent love.
COFFEE OR CIGARETTES
In the 1980s the cigarette culture had a great impact on advertising and cinema. It was a symbol of virility represented by the Marlboro cowboy while with Hollywood the creative agencies made reference to sports in the best California dreams boy style. My father smoked three packs a day of this red pack and didn't even kick a ball. Maybe because of this I was never interested in smoking. I preferred to be the coffee guy, sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by family members and listening to their stories. Notice how magical this is, all it takes is a coffee break and someone will tell you a secret. Nowadays some secrets are worth more than money, and because of this, in my opinion, just like oil, coffee is a kind of black gold.
I started to photograph friends smoking and drinking coffee because both represent different feelings in the collective imagination. Sensuality, selfishness, power, loneliness. These are the points, added to irony and performance that interest me in the quest to capture an image.
In short, the photography I present in this special series "Coffee or Cigarettes" is not a work inspired, as I had often heard, in the 2003 film "Coffee and Cigarettes" by director Jim Jarmusch. It is a way I found to pay homage and dialogue with my father for the rest of my life.
KISS KISS BANG BANG
I grew up watching Spaghetti Western and Japanese science fiction series. I wanted to be Django, Ultraseven, and Dr. Gori all at the same time. To play in the streets you needed nothing more than your imagination to have fun.
In the Japanese series to create a fantastic universe there was a sophistication of narrative mixed with Styrofoam, models, and rockets attached by nylon threads. The costumes, on the other hand, had no connection with anything known in nature.
Psychobilly band, The Cramps, recorded the song "Bikini Girls With Machine Guns" in 1990. Russ Myer, American film director, known for using exaggerated humor and women with large breasts as protagonists, recorded in 1965 "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!". Decades later, more precisely in 2007, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino made the movie "Planet Terror" where one of the main scenes of the feature film, the character Cherry Darling has one of her legs amputated. Cherry, being in danger, fits a machine gun to the wound to finish off her enemies. Does it make sense? Definitely not. And why should it make sense if we are talking about entertainment?
When I work on the instinctive creation of the "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" series it is inevitable not to think of references from the Russian advertising industry, garage music, trash science fiction cinema, and elements of pop culture.
The accessories are plastic objects that gain more meaning in the hands of women that convey more strength and personality in contrast to more delicate sensual essays, which in the popular imaginary sees the woman as vulnerable. "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" brings, with explosion of colors and at other times absence of light, the interpretation of characters with their dreams, personal conflicts, injustices and violence of all kinds about their condition in society.
IDENTIDADE CHANTE NIGHTZ
At the beginning, in 2012, the Chante Nightz aesthetic was born with pop culture concepts. Herbert Baglione, designed a female mouth gently biting part of the lips and with color variations inspired by the 80's. It was a logo that had already been reinterpreted to exhaustion around the world. It's been 10 years under this package and it's time for a change.
To recreate the new visual identity, it took weeks of reflection to come up with an idea that had more strength to dialogue with the world of Chante Nightz. Sensuality, coffee, cigarettes, music and color combinations also inspired by the 80s are non-negotiable, this was the briefing. William imagined adding to these elements the identities of the psychobilly band The Cramps with the Belgian cigarette brand Tigra.
The Cramps is an American band that started their career in 1976 with songs that dealt with themes such as horror B-movies, fetishism and made very theatrical presentations. Their album covers are true kitsch works.
Belgian cigarette brand Tigra also has strong visual appeal with the use of portraits and illustrations of a mysterious model dressed as a tiger. The woman behind the character is Angelina Saey, born in the city of Antwerp in 1933. After signing this work she became a sex symbol in her country.
PHOTOGRAPHER AND CURATOR
Involved in art since 1994, William Baglione was the founder of the artist collective Famiglia (2005 - 2012), managing the careers of eight prominent artists in exhibitions, collectors' works and publicity works, at home and abroad. He was responsible for exhibitions held at cultural centers and galleries in the United States, France, England, Italy and Russia, as well as collabs with national and global brands.
He was curator of the edition dedicated to Brazilian art of Juxtapoz magazine, the bible of urban culture in the United States. He was also curator of events held by the Brazilian Embassy in Moscow and London, bringing Brazilian artists to represent the country in the capitals. In early 2013, William Baglione was co-curator of the charity exhibition SOS Racisme, held at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris.
Between 2013 and 2014, he provided consultancy for the documentary South American Cho-Low together with North American journalist Phuong-Cac. The documentary was shown at some of the main festivals in the United States and featured in a special article on the subject in the New York Times.
In May 2017, he took over the curatorship of the Street River project in Belém do Pará, bringing art, drinking water and solar energy to the riverside peoples. The documentary, produced and directed by TILT Records, made from this first curatorship, was broadcast in an unprecedented way during the largest Street Art festival in Eastern Europe, Vulica Brazil in Belarus, organized by the local Brazilian Embassy. The production won an award at a festival in the principality of Monaco.
In addition to the work carried out within the scope of the curatorship, Baglione has been a photographer for 10 years with his works exhibited in cities in France, the United States, Italy and Brazil.
CONTATO
