From murals to shelves: the Roman artist branded the design of Artico Azienda Agricola with auteur labels
From the street to the art galleries, from the walls to the glass of the bottles; from exhibitions to tastings, from a male-dominated world to the sensual faces of women. We are in Latium, the land that gave birth to Stefano Biagiotti, aka Diamond: “I have a sort of schizophrenia, I draw in many different ways and I feel I have more nuances in the same person, like the faces of a diamond”. The forty-two-year-old Roman artist, at the beginning of the 1990s approached the world of graffiti expressing his own diamond in the urban style with art nouveau quotations. “I have no living masters: I am inspired by Liberty exponents like Klimt and Mucha”. According to Diamond, art is universal: “it is an unstoppable phenomenon, with no borders. From the facade of a building to the canvas, I like to draw: my mother says I did it before I even walked. “
All because of the bottleneck. “I met Federico during an exhibition, we became friends first and then we started working together.” We are talking about Federico Artico, a young wine producer in the area between Aprilia and the Lanuvini Hills. Here, in small land plots of the Roman countryside and the Agro Pontino, he has been undertaking the first winemaking experiments since 2012, by experimenting not only in the vineyard, but also on the label. From collector to client: after getting to know the street artist and buying some of his works, Federico commissioned him to create an exclusive packaging for his wine production. It all started with two stencils that he fell in love with: “it was the Flora and Fauna series that then dressed two white wines, the Amaltea (a Trebbiano), and the Sauvignon“. Both graphics resemble a woman’s features, “the beginning of everything, Mother Nature”, a hymn to good drinking that celebrates nature and life. Apart from a few previous illustrations on menus and wine lists, Diamond was at his first working experience in the wine world with both bottles, and he re-proposed his great classic: the frontal face of a woman surrounded by plant motifs. The label of the Leda rosé was created from scratch, with the image of the swan that Zeus took the form of, in order to seduce the charming queen of Sparta. The latest Diamond-Arctic partnership is Stardust, another white wine that commemorates David Bowie with the lightning-like constellation portrayed on a female eye. “I’m a fan of beer”: although Diamond confesses a preference for hop, he created a unique product with Artico, a bottle that in a wine shop is easily recognized.
