GEORGE TOWN, April 5 — He used to run a chain of fashion stores but his strong passion for street art finally led to his giving up on the fashion industry to go into the art industry instead.

Giancarlo Petrucci, an Italian residing in Newcastle, England, started Graffiti Prints in 2008 but he has been collecting street art far longer than that.

The 41-year-old believes the art industry is evolving with this growing interest in street art where art is no longer something snobbish meant only for the rich.

Back in 2004, Petrucci bought a few Banksy prints because he was fascinated by the beautiful artwork and he even displayed some Banksy prints in his stores with a cheap price tag of £100 (RM546) but nobody was interested then.

Today, a Banksy print is worth thousands, with some works being auctioned off at over £100,000.

Graffiti Prints (www.graffitiprints.com) is both a print house and a gallery selling screen printed and original art works by street artists from all over the world.

Petrucci, together with Hin Bus Depot Art Centre, is jointly organising an art exhibition featuring brilliant street art works by 15 artists called Different Strokes in Penang between March 28 and April 19.

Here, Petrucci shares his insight on the booming street art industry and Ernest Zacharevic… the LIthuanian artist who really kickstarted this interest in street art here in George Town.

In his own words:

• I first came here about a year ago for Ernest Zacharevic’s exhibition, Art in Rubbish. To be honest I’ve never travelled 6,000 miles to come see an artist but Ernest’s work is so powerful so it was an easy decision. I had not been to the Far East before. When I was in the fashion business, I went to China a lot, India, Pakistan, all the places where there was a production line. But I had never been to Thailand or Malaysia. They were places I really wanted to go.
• When I came here, it lived up to all my expectations… very nice people, very nice vibe, I love Penang, it’s a beautiful place, there’s so much history here. Visually Penang is so beautiful… the colonial buildings… I find the shutters are so fascinating. When you go down the street and the shutters are down, it’s almost art in itself. There are a lot of Ernest’s murals here. I love to see Ernest’s murals, everytime I pass them, there are so many people, taking photographs, interacting with it. Thousands of them. To me that’s magical. Street art… the whole point of street art is for people to enjoy it, it’s not for the artists, it’s for people. You know, an artist does a five-storey mural and walks away and goes back to his country. He is leaving that for the people to enjoy, to make the area more beautiful, to add more colour to it.
• I believe that over the next 10 years, a lot of cities and governments are going to realise that by letting street artists paint their cities, it will make the city more beautiful, they will gain more tourism. I mean Penang is very savvy in the way that it realises very quickly that you can get tourism from street art. This is also quite strange in a way because where I’m from, Newcastle in England, there’s a beautiful big wall and looks right over the main iconic bridge of Newcastle, the bridge everybody drives over. It’s massive, it’s about seven stories so I called the council and told them I want to have Ernest paint a beautiful oil painting on the building and free at my cost. But no, they don’t want it. They are too worried that people will come and spray paint tag next to it, so I told them we’d put it really high up but they are worried people will tag underneath it. They are worried that it will encourage tagger artists to paint more in the city centre, which I don’t agree with obviously so it’s very frustrating for me.
• So imagine my delight when I come here, it seems strange that I fly 6,000 miles and everybody is so welcoming. Obviously, there are certain issues with images here like not doing dogs and stuff but nothing major that stops a painting. For me it’s a very easy decision to come here and do a show. I think I will definitely come back to Asia to do more shows. And this place (Hin Bus Depot Art Centre) is basically, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the best venues in the entire world to show street art in, mainly because a lot of it is outdoors and also indoors. There’s an exhibition inside and also paintings outside, to us that’s what street art is about. It’s about indoor works and outdoor works. The outdoor works is for the pleasure of everybody and the indoor works are for collectors. To me, that summarises the marketplace.
• Because essentially, that’s the way our business works. There’s outdoor work for people to enjoy and there’s indoor work for people who wish to collect street art which is a growing number right across the world. Every week, I get new sales from new customers from different parts of the world. I sell everywhere in all five corners of the world. The USA is my biggest market, and Europe is just slightly behind and Asia is probably my third biggest market. I sell a lot of work in Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong.
• Most of my prints, which is a quirk of the market place, 90 per cent of the work that I brought out, are now double the price in the secondary market. For instance, Ernest’s Style Wars prints were £195 each, there were only 55 pieces, today if you could find one on eBay, there’s no way someone would sell it off for less than £500, there’s no chance of that. I wouldn’t be surprised if it costs more. The reason is because the market is growing all the time, street art is growing more popular everywhere around the world. So new collectors drive prices up for all the works, and we’re amazed on a weekly basis how much the market is growing. It’s driven by the world, by social media, Instagram is a street artist’s dream because everybody shares. An artist can leave a piece somewhere in a world, everybody takes a photo and instagrams it, says who’s the artist and the artist gets constant promotion, from random people they’ve never met, who just appreciate their work.
• It’s going to change the art world. I mean the art world is fighting against us. Some of them have opened up, they realised why our art is for the people, it’s not trying to be posh, or trying to be “it’s not good enough for you, you can’t come in to see it”, it’s not about that. Anyone can buy street art.
• I’m very much a geek. When I was in the fashion industry, it can be the best fabric and the best colour and the best design but if I get the measurement for the higher shoulder point wrong, if it’s two centimetres off, it doesn’t sit right, nobody would buy it. So coming from the fashion business really helps me because I was used to a business where I couldn’t make one mistake. When working with artists, it’s about perfection, it’s about making sure that the product is the best quality it can be.
• Different Strokes is all about different styles of street art. I want to show off the widest selection of street art styles. It was just really a random thing when picking artists for this show…I picked between styles and checked who can come. In Penang, you only see a certain section of street art which is very driven by Zacharevic so I want to show a wider selection of styles that are different from one another.
• Ernest is such a great talent. He’s like a phenomenon. The reason he’s a phenomenon is because he can paint in any technique. Spray paint, chalk, crayon, charcoal… honestly, I’ve seen so many techniques by Ernest and every piece I will go “Whoa it’s brilliant.” He’s that good. You’re so lucky to have Ernest here and his pieces all around here. I really believe that once he’s dead and street art is in the past and everyone is looking back, Ernest will be up there with Picasso.