Simple posters as a living form of contemporary art, which rebuff everyday life and verge upon beauty. A form of “enticement” to those people that do not regularly frequent art galleries and museums, but even to those who are recurrent visitors. The street becomes a place for all walks of life, where each may leave a mark, more or less subversive, more or less covertly.

Art: who loves it, who hates it, who doesn’t understand it, who disagrees with it, and who – for the most part – ignores it and just passes it by without any notice.

And if, suddenly, whilst walking and lifting your gaze for a split second, one were to meet the insistent stare of a work of art, fixated on the passerby from a banner? If, for once, it is Art that looks upon the audience and not the other way around?

This is what takes place with IO è TE, an expo directed by Francesca Alfano Miglietti, which will occupy the streets of Milan for two weeks, starting on September 24th, 2014.

IO è TE is the third exhibition organized within the TenderToArt project, the contemporary art brainchild of Moreno Zani, founding partner and Chairman of Tendercapital, and Francesca Alfano Miglietti, art theorist and critic, professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, started in 2011.

IO è TE begins on the streets, with the aim to become a temporary fixture of the urban landscape of various cities, but mainly Milan. Eighteen artists display their works in rare and unconceivable venues, for a total of thirty one art pieces, all united by one common thread: the themes of identity, unique and at the same time manifold, and relationships, within oneself or with others.

An exhibition centered upon themselves, created as an ever-changing identity, an exploration of relationships which characterise these modern times, a probe of the theme of duplicity and the ungraspable nature of events. One or two pieces of art have been selected per single artist, each containing a conceptual pair of people, animals, or inanimate objects. Rather than confined to a particular category, whose boundaries can be statically defined, we are faced with a tension field, a constellation of thematic elements which change between the different pieces of art.

Franko B • Letizia Battaglia • Valerio Berruti • Matteo Carassale • Janieta Eyre • Cesare Fullone • Branko Jankovic • Francesco Jodice • Gilivanka Kedzior & Barbara Friedman • Shai Ignatz • Antonio Marras • Sebastiano Mauri • Roman Opalka • Qasim Riza Shaheen • Annalisa Riva • Manuel Vason • Paolo Ventura

All the artists - Italians, foreigners, or stateless persons - have accepted that their works be reproduced in the form of a poster and hung on the streets of the city, openly exposed to the weather and to the scrutiny of its inhabitants, in a reversal of the conventional relationship between works of art and their viewers. Portraits, icons, secondary characters: expressions of art that engage both the observant and the distracted passers-by, until the atmospheric agents consume them and give way to other forms of communication. Art becomes a travelling companion, set away from art galleries and museums, that gets in touch with the everyday lives of people, as electrifying as a chance encounter. Until it moves away from our field of vision, returned to a state of indifference and disinterest.

“IOèTE is a collection of images that will not be forgotten – claims the curator – The aim is to keep the narrative transfixed in a unique and non-reproducible situation in which an event, or experience, is absorbed without explicitly defining the effects, without establishing and quantifying the change, without determining the starting point and hence without being able to account for the finishing point: art encountered on the streets, enveloped in curiosity, disturbed by illusions that fade away without yet leaving a mark, in the proclamation of life, in the ongoing desire of new discovery.”

These urban “shocks” are portrayed by images and texts that can be found on the blog tendertoart.com, where it will be possible to visualize the locations of the different art works throughout the city, and on the social networking site with official hashtag #ioéte. The project will culminate in a literary publication of not only all the art works created by the artists, but also a description of the different stages comprising the project in its entirety.

Following the Milan events, there will be other expos hosted in various other European cities, which will continue the investigation of the concept of identity, unique and at the same time manifold, which changes with the convergences of different cultural and emotive realities.