November 1st-15th, 1984, Milan, Rome, Turin, Bologna, Florence
‘500 young faces’, a project covering a total painted surface of 5,371 square meters took place simultaneously in Milan, Rome, Turin, Bologna, and Florence during the first half of November 1984.
1,336 portraits were produced to fit the standard billboard formats of 6×3 meters and 2×1,40 meters.
The cultural sponsor ‘Ciesse Piumini’, a sportswear company and the advertising agency ‘Solutions’ of Luigi Costa, together with the author created a large format ‘pre-printed headed paper’ with the company logo, on which the artist manually painted his studio the entire ‘500 young faces’ series.
100 young people from each city were photographed with a special camera.
The negatives were then projected on the large sheets and each portrait was freely interpreted with brush and black printing ink by the artist. Each portrait was identified with the name of the person represented and a telegram was sent to all participants specifying the place where the portrait was exhibited.
In Milan, thanks to the collaboration of A.T.M. (Milan Transport Company), the Palestro subway station was transformed into an art gallery exhibiting 100 portraits, while on the surface, a hundred jumbo trams bore on their sides smaller versions the originals.
Five different versions of a poster-document showing all the portraits of each single city were released and a 4-minute commercial on the project was televised for a month on ‘Videomusic’ channel.